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The genetic history of Greenlandic-European contact.

Waples, RK; Hauptmann, AL; Seiding, I; Jørsboe, E; Jørgensen, ME; Grarup, N; Andersen, MK; ... Moltke, I; + view all (2021) The genetic history of Greenlandic-European contact. Current Biology 10.1016/j.cub.2021.02.041. (In press). Green open access

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Abstract

The Inuit ancestors of the Greenlandic people arrived in Greenland close to 1,000 years ago.1 Since then, Europeans from many different countries have been present in Greenland. Consequently, the present-day Greenlandic population has ∼25% of its genetic ancestry from Europe.2 In this study, we investigated to what extent different European countries have contributed to this genetic ancestry. We combined dense SNP chip data from 3,972 Greenlanders and 8,275 Europeans from 14 countries and inferred the ancestry contribution from each of these 14 countries using haplotype-based methods. Due to the rapid increase in population size in Greenland over the past ∼100 years, we hypothesized that earlier European interactions, such as pre-colonial Dutch whalers and early German and Danish-Norwegian missionaries, as well as the later Danish colonists and post-colonial immigrants, all contributed European genetic ancestry. However, we found that the European ancestry is almost entirely Danish and that a substantial fraction is from admixture that took place within the last few generations.

Type: Article
Title: The genetic history of Greenlandic-European contact.
Location: England
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2021.02.041
Publisher version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2021.02.041
Language: English
Additional information: © 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Keywords: Greenland, Greenlandic-European contact, admixture, ancestry, genetic history, human, population genetics
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences > Div of Biosciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences > Div of Biosciences > Genetics, Evolution and Environment
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10124999
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