Gotme? Nope.

Rienzi, you are grasping at straws.

I posted the abstract on the East/West European division in dental morphology close to two days ago, but I'll pretend you found it by downloading the pdf via Dienekes and reading through dozens of pages. The fact I posted it might have given you a hint I have no interest in minimizing East-West differences in Europe. I've consistently identified Northwestern Europeans (particularly those of long tenure in America) as my ingroup. One needs only one's eyes to see that Poles and Englishmen are genetically distinct.

The fact remains: the best evidence indicates the primary genetic division in Europe is between North/Central Europeans (including northern Slavs) and Southern Europeans. This doesn't mean there are no other distinctions to be made. It means those distinctions are relatively less important from the standpoint of EGI. And if you are concerned about EGI, you should probably be looking for a test that at minimum can make that primary intra-European distinction (i.e., N. vs. S.)--not pushing a crude "assay" of quad-continental affiliation.

Back to the study: before you get too excited, you might want to find out exactly which populations were studied. Were, e.g., samples from Greece and S. Italy included? Regardless, no, there's no basis for generalizing from tooth morphology to "functional genes" across board. If anything, we might expect that due to climate and disease the N-S division is stronger in the adaptive portion of the genome. To wildly speculate, I could imagine some of the genes that influence personality and national character might be a different matter. Are western Europeans better suited for self-government? If so, western Europe would seem to stop before Naples.

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