This diagram is fascinating. But the commentary is just as interesting, showing the degree to which all of us born in the last century, in the West especially, think of nation-states as actual geographical entities.* What I mean is, the comments mostly express surprise at genetic dissimilarities within the same state, or similarities between different states. But from a historical point of view, there’s no reason this should be surprising.
The last century has pretty well demolished the idea that nation states have some inherent racial existence, as if there is a single “Portugese people” (to avoid Godwin’s Law) that has always been a unified linguistic and cultural entity. So why should the modern state of Portugal have a single genome, different from that of its neighbors? (Well, neighbor singular, in the case of Portugal.) Especially in Eastern Europe nation states arose as political-linguistic identities among elites; states were then created, and ethnic cleansing, with varying degrees of violence, brought the actual populations within a given state’s boundaries roughly into line with what the identity said should be there. So who lives in a given state now is largely a function of language, but the spread zone of a language is itself a historical creation…so why should it map to a genome? It shouldn’t.
My favorite example of how nation states are now geographical entities, is the wooden puzzle you can find where each piece is a country…as if national boundaries were tectonic plate lines. If you ask someone where Bohemia is, they’ll say “the Western Czech Republic.” Really, it should be the other way around: when asked where the Czech Republic is, we should say “parts of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia.” After all, those regions are a lot more than 15 years old.
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