NEWS Three questions to Erling Häggström Lundevaller, statistician at CEDAR, who is participating in a workshop on genetic genealogy in Leuven, Belgium.
Erling Häggström Lundevaller, statistician at CEDAR
On October 7th you will participate in a workshop organized by The Scientific Network for Historical Demography, what is this workshop ?
– Yes I will take part in the workshop Nature & Nurture: Exploring the Links between Genetics and Historical Demography. The workshop promotes the use of methods from the evolving DNA analysis field to answer questions in historical demography.
Is there anything special during the workshop that you are looking forward to?
– I look forward to meet others that also have begun to take advantage of the opportunities the DNA analyzes revolution gives us to answer questions in historical demography.
Will you be presenting your own research during the workshop?
– Yes, I will present results from my ”Västerbotten DNA” projekt.
Summary of the presentation
The DNA analysis revolution, making it possible to in detail analyze the fundamental building blocks of human life, has profoundly changed many scientific fields. For historical demography it provides us with a new tool, allowing us to revisit questions previously analyzed with traditional methods, and even to ask questions that just a few decades ago was far out of reach. In this study we will utilize methods from the emerging DNA testing field to shed light on the demographic history of the province of Västerbotten in northern Sweden. We use the Y-chromosome that is passed on from father to sun. If a mutation occurs on it all descendants on the patrilineal line will carry it also thus showing us the origin.
In the study we analyze the Y-chromosome of 148 men from Västerbotten to explore their patrilinear origin. It reveals that many share a common forefather living rather recently. One forefather, probably living in the Skellefteå parish just a couple hundred years ago, is the “grandfather” to 11 of the 148 men in the study. A link to native Americans is found as 8 of the testers have mutations otherwise only found in America.
Here you can see the program for Nature & Nurture: Exploring the Links between Genetics and Historical Demography