Editorial
Croatian genetic heritage: Y-chromosome story
Dragan Primorac
orcid.org/0000-0001-5565-080X
; University of Split, Medical School, Split, Croatia
Damir Marjanović
; Institute for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Pavao Rudan
; Institute for Anthropology, Zagreb, Croatia
Richard Villems
; Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of Tartu and Estonian Biocentre, Tartu, Estonia
Peter A. Underhill
; Department of Genetics, Stanford University, School of Medicine, Palo Alto, Calif, USA
Abstract
The aim of this article is to offer a concise interpretation of
the scientific data about the topic of Croatian genetic heritage that was obtained over the past 10 years. We made a
short overview of previously published articles by our and
other groups, based mostly on Y-chromosome results. The
data demonstrate that Croatian human population, as almost any other European population, represents remarkable genetic mixture. More than 3/4 of the contemporary
Croatian men are most probably the offspring of Old Europeans who came here before and after the Last Glacial
Maximum. The rest of the population is the offspring of the
people who were arriving in this part of Europe through
the southeastern route in the last 10 000 years, mostly during the neolithization process. We believe that the latest
discoveries made with the techniques for whole-genome
typing using the array technology, will help us understand
the structure of Croatian population in more detail, as well
as the aspects of its demographic history
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
71434
URI
Publication date:
15.6.2011.
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