At 12:25 PM 10/18/00 -0400, David Honig wrote:
Some scandanavian countries have complete health records on all their citizens and some are working on national DNA banks. Some of these will be made available for research after some form of anonymization.
Specifically Iceland - the population is small, and hasn't had much mixing with other people since the decline of Viking raiding, and most of the mixing since then was with Norwegians who were relatively similar. There were Irish monks in Iceland when the Vikings got there, and there's some DNA evidence that many of the early women were from England and Ireland, presumably kidnapped in Viking raids. Also, while the earlier saga periods have mixed-quality record keeping, there's been enough history of land-ownership records and church and family records of births to make studies easier. Other Scandinavian countries would be much more difficult - larger populations, much more trade and travel and viking, lower literacy, nomadic Lapps in the north, etc. Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639