Scandinavian people today are descendants of Stone Age migrants

Today's Scandinavians are not descended from the last ice age migrants, but they come from a group of people who come here later to bring agricultural production. This is the conclusion of a new study of genetics and archeology conducted by Swedish scientists

Anders Götherström, officer of the Department of Evolutionary Biology at Uppsala University, one of the two main authors of the study, said: 'Hunting groups focus on settling on Scandinavia more than 4,000 years ago. Genetic capital is different from ours today. '

This is a collaborative work between Swedish, Danish and UK research groups. In the study that used Stone Age DNA samples to investigate whether crop cultivation and livestock grazing practices were popular with immigrants or it was a progressive step for groups of hunters. Focused shooting settled there before.

'To achieve reliable results from ancient DNA sequences is a very complicated process,' said Helena Malmström, an officer of the Uppsala University's Department of Evolutionary Biology.

She began conducting DNA sequences from Stone Age genetic material 3 years ago. Later, researchers needed a considerable amount of time to confirm that this genetic material had a lifespan of thousands of years.

'This is an age-old issue of archeology,' said Petra Molnar, a member of the Archeology Research Laboratory at Stockholm University. 'Our results show that the Scandinavian people today are not direct descendants of concentrated hunting groups living in this area during the Stone Age. This led to the conclusion that there was an immigration wave that took place in the Scandinavian peninsula, perhaps at the beginning of the Stone Age. However, the scale of this immigration phase has not been determined yet. '

Refer:

Helena Malmström, M.Thomas P. Gilbert, Mark G. Thomas, Mikael Brandström, Jan Storå, Petra Molnar, Pernille K. Andersen, Christian Bendixen, Gunilla Holmlund, Anders Götherström, and Eske Willerslev.Ancient DNA Reveals Between Neolithic Hunter-Gatherers and Contemporary Scandinavians.Current Biology, 2009;DOI: 10.1016 / j.cub.2009.09.017

New research shows that Scandinavian people today do not appear to be descendants of the last ice age migrants who originated from a group of people who came here later to bring agricultural production.(Photo: iStockphoto / Jean Assell)