Posts by DK1

DK1

29 Apr 2009

Genealogy / Are all Poles blue eyed and blonde? [450]

A lot of you people are clearly nuts.

Most Europeans have dark hair. What's so unsual about some Poles being darker than average in North/Central Europe. It's called variation.

Do you think blond people came from outer space and settled in Northern Europe, or maybe dark haired and dark skinned humans got there from the south, and eventually most of them turned pale due to adaptation? Probably the latter I would say.

This place is like some sort of mental asylum most of the time. Pft...

DK1

8 Feb 2009

Genealogy / Mongolian the Golden Horde - do Poles have Mongolian ancestry? [256]

The "eastern" influence in Poles is Finno-Ugrian, so Uralic rather than Asian. But either way, its minimal, and more common in Scandinavia.

It's really not a mystery. Lots of detailed genetic studies have now been done on different parts of Poland. And we'll get a more detailed breakdown of the data over the next year or so, as more studies are completed.

My mom's family has some Polish, also German and French.

Charles Bronson was a Lithuanian Tatar.

Also, Lithuanians carry 30-40% of the Uralic marker called Tat-C (or N). It's rare in Poland, but common in North Eastern Europe, and tied to ancient migrations from near the Urals.

Oleg Balanovsky, Two Sources of the Russian Patrilineal Heritage in Their Eurasian Context, The American Journal of Human Genetics, Volume 82, Issue 1, 236-250, 10 January 2008, doi:10.1016/j.ajhg.2007.09.019

DK1

16 Jan 2009

Genealogy / Mongolian the Golden Horde - do Poles have Mongolian ancestry? [256]

Btw...

The above study used many genome wide SNPs, which are markers located at different sites around the genome that give an indication of genetic structure, and thus genetic relationships.

Other, somewhat less sophisticated ways of looking at population genetics are Y-chromosome (paternal) and mtDNA (maternal) lineages. These can give us an idea of the ancestry of groups and individuals, provided we also take into consideration the sex biased nature of these lineages, genetic drift and natural selection.

Here are a couple of reports...

Rafal Ploski, Homogeneity and distinctiveness of Polish paternal lineages revealed by Y chromosome microsatellite haplotype analysis, 10.1007/s00439-002-0728-0

B. A. MALYARCHUK, Mitochondrial DNA variability in Poles and Russians, 10.1046/j.1469-1809.2002.00116.x

*edit: By the way, people on this thread seem to know a lot about genetics and I want to have a DNA test.

Your best bet is 23andme. All other companies aren't worth the bother at the moment, or they're too expensive.

23andme.com

DK1

15 Jan 2009

Genealogy / Mongolian the Golden Horde - do Poles have Mongolian ancestry? [256]

I will attempt to answer my own question: Is it because Moscow is of a different history and mixture than St. Petersburg and Northern Russia?

"Moscow" here is a proxy location for the ethnic Russian sample, which comes from all over European Russia.

At any rate, given history, I personally find the conclusion that the "Poles affinity to the Asians is rather weak" when Russia's is strong rather weak itself.

The intra-European comparison just looks at European genetic variation, while the inter-continental comparison is the one that considers foreign admixture.

So the reason for this difference between Russians and Poles is because European Russia is inhabited by many Finno-Ugric and Turkic ethnicities, who have ancient links to East Asians. Thus, some Russians (about 10% on the plot above), are actually just Russified Finno-Ugrics and Turkics, or they are Slavs who have a lot of that admix.

Poland was never inhabited by these groups in a big way, and various migrations and invasions have not proved to have a major demographic impact on the population.

In any case, the samples and amount of markers tested here are very impressive. They give an objective view of genetic relationships. On the other hand, historical sources tend to be imprecise and very subjective.

DK1

15 Jan 2009

Genealogy / Mongolian the Golden Horde - do Poles have Mongolian ancestry? [256]

Hello everyone,

For those interested where Poles place in terms of intra-European and inter-continental genetic structure, please refer to my blog. You'll find there many links to latest studies and my commentary on them. Here's an examle...

Polish, European and world samples compared using almost 400,000 genome wide markers

Anyway, this study does have some very neat tables showing the relative affinity of the groups to each other. Spaniards exhibit the strongest links to the African sample, the Yoruba from Nigeria. On the other hand, its the Russians who are relatively closest to the Asians from China and Japan. Moreover, some individuals from France, Great Britain, Romania and Germany are also being pulled towards the non-Europeans, possibly indicating some sort of admixture? Hard to say, because the study doesn't really focus on that. Interestingly, the Poles' affinity to the Africans and Asians is rather weak in comparison to that shown by most of the other European groups.

On a final note, it's curious that unlike previous studies of this sort, the main gradient here is the one running from west to east, and not north to south. I suspect a lack of samples form Itlay and the southern Balkans is largely the reason for that.

polishgenes.blogspot

^ Here's a diagram from the above mentioned study, illustrating the genetic position of Poles compared to other Europeans, as well as the Han Chinese, Japanese and Nigerians.

Simon C Heath, Investigation of the fine structure of European populations with applications to disease association studies, doi:10.1038/ejhg.2008.210