Scandinavia before the Indo European expansion?

[Wild North]

How was Scandinavia before the Indo European expansion ethnically and racially?

http://www.humanjourney.us/indoEurope.html

http://polishgenes.blogspot.se/2013/...roto-indo.html

http://www.goggo.com/terry/Haplogrou...Migrations.pdf

According to Kalevi Wiik:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalevi_Wiik

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germani...ate_hypothesis

[Wild North]

Bump!


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funnelbeaker_culture

[FeederOfRavens]

From a Y-DNA perspective, there's very little continuity between Pre-Neolithic Scandinavia and Modern day Scandinavia. Presuming the theory on the spread of I1 into Northern Europe is correct then the vast majority of present Y-DNA haplogroups came to Scandinavia during or after the Neolithic.

[Dombra]

From a Y-DNA perspective, there's very little continuity between Pre-Neolithic Scandinavia and Modern day Scandinavia. Presuming the theory on the spread of I1 into Northern Europe is correct then the vast majority of present Y-DNA haplogroups came to Scandinavia during or after the Neolithic.

I1 is native to northern Europe, it is pre-IE

[FeederOfRavens]

I1 is native to northern Europe, it is pre-IE

It is pre-IE but still Neolithic.

[igo112]

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[Black Wolf]

Before the Indo-Europeans arrived Scandinavia was populated by two types of people(s) mainly. Farming people(s) descended from Neolithic farmers who were genetically similar to other Neolithic farming groups from Southern Europe and in certain parts Mesolithic hunter-gatherer people(s) who had survived quite late in the more interior and northerly regions.

[Anders Hoveland]

Scandinavia before the Indo European expansion?

This is an excellent question, and a very intriguing one.

I have seen some research which showed that the earliest inhabitants were not well adapted to digesting dairy products, this was before cows and wheat were brought to the region. This was very ancient, because dairy products have been important food source in Scandinavia for over 2000 years. Most likely the population rapidly adapted to the change over the course of a few hundred years, through natural selection (higher reproductive success of the better nourished, or those who did not have to expend time hunting as frequently).

The traditional population of Scandinavia has not changed all that much since ancient times (it has only been in the last 70 years, and especially within the last 30 years, that there has been a large influx of immigrants into the region).

I would imagine there was originally some small contribution from the Laplanders in the North into the genetic pool of ancient Scandinavians, before their numbers grew. Of course, there has been a small degree of gradual intermixing since that time also. But this still does not answer the main question.

The main question would be where the so-called Proto-Germanic peoples came from. And that is a very complicated subject to try to delve into. Supposedly, according to ethnologists, essentially all the people in modern-day Europe are descended from the Indo-European expansion, but we know that is not entirely the full explanation. And we do not even know who these "Indo-European" people were, or whether there might have been different separate groups that migrated to different parts of Europe in prehistoric times.

In a few remote mountain tribes in Afghanistan, the people could easily be mistaken for germans (blonde hair/blue eyes), which is evidence that the wider region was once inhabited by lighter skinned people before other darker skinned people came. Some of this was the basis for the Nazi ideological theory that an ancient "Aryan race" once inhabited a vast area, and that the germanic peoples are the purest descendants of the Aryans. While there may be some truth to this hypothesis, it may in many ways not be correct. I have seen several pictures of these mountain tribe people, and they definitely have more "german"-type facial features, not Slavic. This is very perplexing because these tribes have presumably been there since ancient times, and Afghanistan is not anywhere near the area where germanic peoples live. Unlikely to be descended from Vikings either, because the Vikings tended to settle along rivers, whereas the tribes residing up in remote places in the mountains indicate that they are more likely to be descended from the ancient inhabitants of that region, leftover after other groups came into the region at a later period in history.

There is even more evidence that the "Aryan"-type people may have once been wide-spread in Eastern Europe and Central Asia in prehistoric times, but unfortunately I do not have the time to get into it all here. Of course, almost all traces of them were wiped out by subsequent migrations of other groups into the area.

[Jackson]

I1 is native to northern Europe, it is pre-IE

It seems to have expanded along with R1 lineages from the late Neolithic/early Bronze Age according to a recent paper, and it has been found in early Neolithic Hungary - my bet is that it was picked up and then expanded within the context of the earliest cultures that get going around that time, inhabited mainly by people who were like modern day north Europeans.

[Äijä]

I1 is native to northern Europe, it is pre-IE

Maybe, but by the time they arrived in Finland they where Germanic, most likely the same moving up Scandinavia.