Abstract
Homogeneous Proto-Slavic genetic substrate and/or extensive mixing after World War II were suggested to explain homogeneity of contemporary Polish paternal lineages. Alternatively, Polish local populations might have displayed pre-war genetic heterogeneity owing to genetic drift and/or gene flow with neighbouring populations. Although sharp genetic discontinuity along the political border between Poland and Germany indisputably results from war-mediated resettlements and homogenisation, it remained unknown whether Y-chromosomal diversity in ethnically/linguistically defined populations was clinal or discontinuous before the war. In order to answer these questions and elucidate early Slavic migrations, 1156 individuals from several Slavic and German populations were analysed, including Polish pre-war regional populations and an autochthonous Slavic population from Germany. Y chromosomes were assigned to 39 haplogroups and genotyped for 19 STRs. Genetic distances revealed similar degree of differentiation of Slavic-speaking pre-war populations from German populations irrespective of duration and intensity of contacts with German speakers. Admixture estimates showed minor Slavic paternal ancestry (∼20%) in modern eastern Germans and hardly detectable German paternal ancestry in Slavs neighbouring German populations for centuries. BATWING analysis of isolated Slavic populations revealed that their divergence was preceded by rapid demographic growth, undermining theory that Slavic expansion was primarily linguistic rather than population spread. Polish pre-war regional populations showed within-group heterogeneity and lower STR variation within R-M17 subclades compared with modern populations, which might have been homogenised by war resettlements. Our results suggest that genetic studies on early human history in the Vistula and Oder basins should rely on reconstructed pre-war rather than modern populations.
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Acknowledgements
We thank all the donors, who have voluntarily donated their biological samples for the study, Professor Thomas Meitinger (Institute of Human Genetics, Neuherberg) for sharing samples, Professor Manfred Kayser (Erasmus University Medical Centre, Rotterdam) for Y-chromosomal lineage data from German regional populations, and Isabel Mendizabal (Institut de Biologia Evolutiva, CSIC-UPF) and Dr David F Soria-Hernanz (National Geographic Society) for an R script implemented in analysis of BATWING output files. BATWING and R calculations were carried out at the Academic Computer Centre in Gdańsk and on a computer cluster at the IBE, CSIC-UPF in Barcelona. KR was supported by the Foundation for Polish Science within the KOLUMB Programme and by the ‘Crescendum Est – Polonia’ Foundation. BM-C and DC were supported by MCINN grant CGL2010-14944/BOS.
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The Genographic Consortium
Syama Adhikarla1, Christina J Adler2, Elena Balanovska3, Oleg Balanovsky3, Jaume Bertranpetit4, Andrew C Clarke5, Alan Cooper2, Clio SI Der Sarkissian2, Matthew C Dulik6, Jill B Gaieski6, ArunKumar GaneshPrasad1, Wolfgang Haak2, Marc Haber4,7, Angela Hobbs8, Asif Javed9, Li Jin10, Matthew E Kaplan11, Shilin Li10, Elizabeth A Matisoo-Smith5, Marta Melé4, Nirav C Merchant11, R John Mitchell12, Amanda C Owings6, Laxmi Parida9, Ramasamy Pitchappan1, Daniel E Platt9, Colin Renfrew13, Daniela R Lacerda14, Ajay K Royyuru9, Fabrício R Santos14, Theodore G Schurr6, Himla Soodyall8, David F Soria Hernanz15, Pandikumar Swamikrishnan16, Chris Tyler-Smith17, Arun Varatharajan Santhakumari1, Pedro Paulo Vieira18, Miguel G Vilar6, R Spencer Wells15, Pierre A Zalloua7, Janet S Ziegle19
Affiliations for participants: 1Madurai Kamaraj University, Madurai, Tamil Nadu, India; 2University of Adelaide, South Australia, Australia; 3Research Centre for Medical Genetics, Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, Moscow, Russia; 4Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain; 5University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand; 6University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA; 7Lebanese American University, Chouran, Beirut, Lebanon; 8National Health Laboratory Service, Johannesburg, South Africa; 9IBM, Yorktown Heights, NY, USA; 10Fudan University, Shanghai, China; 11University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA; 12La Trobe University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia; 13University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK; 14Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil; 15National Geographic Society, Washington, DC, USA; 16IBM, Somers, NY, USA; 17The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Hinxton, UK; 18Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; 19Applied Biosystems, Foster City, CA, USA
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Rębała, K., Martínez-Cruz, B., Tönjes, A. et al. Contemporary paternal genetic landscape of Polish and German populations: from early medieval Slavic expansion to post-World War II resettlements. Eur J Hum Genet 21, 415–422 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/ejhg.2012.190
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/ejhg.2012.190
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