CDR: Re: why should it be trusted? (DNA thread...)

[Bill Stewart]

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 at pobox.com
PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF  3C85 B884 0ABE 4639