Scandinavian hunter-gatherer
During the Neolithic, they admixed further with Early European Farmers (EEFs) and Western Steppe Herders (WSHs).
[c] Scandinavian hunter-gatherers (SHG) were identified as a distinct ancestral component by Lazaridis et al. (2014).
The study found SHGs to constitute one of the three main hunter-gatherer populations of Europe during the Mesolithic.
WHGs were modeled as descendants of the Upper Paleolithic people (Cro-Magnon) of the Grotte du Bichon in Switzerland with minor additional EHG admixture (~7%).
These WHGs and EHGs had subsequently mixed, and the SHGs gradually developed their distinct character.
SHGs displayed a high frequency of the depigmentation alleles SLC45A2 and SLC24A5, and the OCA/Herc2, which affects eye pigmentation.
[b] A study published in Nature in February 2018 included an analysis of a large number of individuals of prehistoric Eastern Europe.
[13] According to Mathieson et al. (2015), 50% of Scandinavian Hunter Gatherers from Motala carried the derived variant of EDAR-V370A.
[20] Mathieson et al. (2015) also reported: "A second surprise is that, unlike closely related western hunter-gatherers, the Motala samples have predominantly derived pigmentation alleles at SLC45A2 and SLC24A5.
Both light and dark skin pigmentation alleles are found at intermediate frequencies in the Scandinavian Hunter Gatherers sampled, but only one individual had exclusively light-skin variants of two different SNPs.
The study found that depigmentation variants of genes for light skin pigmentation (SLC24A5, SLC45A2) and blue eye pigmentation (OCA2/HERC2) are found at high frequency in SHGs relative to WHGs and EHGs, which the study suggests cannot be explained simply as a result of the admixture of WHGs and EHGs.
The study argues that these allele frequencies must have continued to increase in SHGs after admixture, which was probably caused by environmental adaptation to high latitudes.
[21] On the basis of archaeological and genetic evidence, the Swedish archaeologist Oscar D. Nilsson has made forensic reconstructions of both male and female SHGs.
