europe

I put together a PCA map, which documents the autosomal profile of the released academic samples who are relevant to Southeast Europe. This is the timeline of how your ancestors looked like from an autosomal POV during different time periods. We are missing a lot of data still, but some...

Travelling in different countries I couldn't help but notice that the brands of cars on the road can vary quite a bit. Obviously people tend to buy more cars from their own country, either for patriotic reasons or because the marketing is better, the cars are designed in accordance with the...

A new survey by the Pew Research Center analyses the percentages of practising and non-practising Christians and unaffiliated people across West European countries. Here are a few infographics to illustrate the findings. The Benelux and Nordic countries have the least practising Christians...

I have noticed that the price of car rentals can vary quite a bit between countries and interestingly the GDP per capita or general cost of life does not correlate at all with the price of car rentals. I have used the site CarRentals.com to compare prices in major European cities and capitals...

I noticed that there was no good map covering all countries with serious data, so I made one. This map was made based on the combined data from Wikipedia, Worlddata.info, a study by Grasgruber et al. (2016) (for the Middle East and North Africa), Diggita (for Italian regions) and Destatis (for...

In another thread, I was explaining how, for many Northwest Europeans, the decision to get married or live under a civil union or domestic partnership was often simply motivated by the desire to have a wedding party (still a dream for many women, regardless of their religiosity). I was...

I have made a map showing the average time spent watching TV (in minutes) in and around Europe. The data for this map comes from Statista (for Europe), Zenith OptiMedia (for the Middle East) and Ipsos (for Lebanon only). For the sake of comparison, Americans spend 270 minutes per day in front...

The new World Happiness Report 2018 was published last week. 156 countries were surveyed. The ranking includes a number of factors such as y: GDP per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, generosity, and perceptions of corruption. Generosity is based on...

I announced two months ago the launch of the One Family One World Project, a partnership between Eupedia and Living DNA. I have been very busy lately, but finally found time to present the project on Eupedia. My contribution to the project was to delimit the boundaries of the proposed genetic...

An interactive chart by The Economist shows the relation between life expectancy, GDP per capita, and the proportion of elderly people living in good health. The results are somewhat surprising. While the French, Swiss, Italians and Spaniards live the longest, the graph shows that relatively...

I read if Catalonia were to proclaim independence unilaterally in the next few days without the approbation of Madrid, Catalonia would not automatically become a member of the European Union. The logic is that if it splits from a member state of the EU, it would need to re-apply for EU...

In 2013 Mastercard release a report called Cashless Journey, analysing the percentage of cashless transactions as a share of the total value of consumer payments in 33 countries. Here is the ranking. Belgium : 93% France : 92% Canada : 90% United Kingdom : 89% Sweden : 89% Australia : 86%...

I played around with nMonte and Global 10. Managed to get some pretty small distances in the end. Though, we need Bronze Age and Iron Age genomes from Southeastern Europe for a better accuracy. Background (results with commercial calculators): 23andme FTDNA MyHeritage DNA Land Global...

Is there anyone until now who has proposed that the steppe people were indo-europeanized by the Cucuteni-trypilian culture before they entered Europe? That would sure explain why the balkans doesn't have as much steppe input as northern europe, and why the balkans seem to have older branches of...

I have been in contact with David Nicholson, the managing director of Living DNA, and he informed me that they are planning to launch regional projects for every European country (and potentially also beyond Europe) in the coming months. Their aim is to map the world's DNA in order to fight...

I have been making socio-economic maps for several years. Here is the latest addition. I have calculated the average unemployment rates for the 12-year period 2004-2015. Unemployment rates change all the time and it is only useful to compare the economic health of countries based on data...

I have hypothesised for several years that the wave of Neolithic farmers who came from the southern Levant through North Africa brought a quite different set of haplogroups and autosomal admixture than the Anatolian farmers that colonised the Balkans and Central Europe. There is ample...

I realised that many people did not have a clear view of the percentage of European ancestry outside Europe. Goga wrongly believed that Armenians had much higher European ancestry than Indian Brahmins, when in fact Brahmins have about three times more European admixture (15% against 5%) if we...

Should Armenia be considered Middle East? Poll! Armenia has historic ties to the Persian, Roman, and Greek empires. Armenia has cultural similarities to other Caucasus nations, such as Georgians and Azeris. Armenians resemble other Caucasus people, such as Georgians and Azeris. Armenia is a...

I finally found some time to make the map of Yamna admixture using the data from Eurogenes Steppe K10. There was no data for some countries, so I had to guess based on neighbouring countries or isolated samples reported on forums. That is the case for Portugal, Ireland, Wales, the Netherlands...