Hacker News Reader

Comment by leiaru13 | Hacker News Reader

The amount of division in the Balkans -- especially in the last 20-30 years -- has never made much sense to me, given how close culturally and ethnically most of the population is. This only confirms that the fragmentation of the region is driven more from the creation of 'national myths' than on genetic differences between different groups of people.

View on HN

> This only confirms that the fragmentation of the region is driven more from the creation of 'national myths' than on genetic differences

Always has been. You think there was such a thing as “French” a thousand years ago? Are people from Munich really that different than Vienna? Do folks in Geneva really differ deeply from people in Lyon?

Europe is very small. From Kyev, capital of Ukraine, to Ljubljana, capital of Slovenia, it’s about the same distance as San Francisco to Los Angeles. Yet it crosses 3 countries.

Kings and governments come and go, but the people stay. My great grandma, for example, lived in 4 different countries without leaving her village.

Kyev, capital of Ukraine, to Ljubljana, capital of Slovenia, it’s about the same distance as San Francisco to Los Angeles.

One is a bit over 500 km and the other is about 1300 km. It's not meaningfully 'about the same distance'. It's an enourmous distance to hit only three European countries, though, you can do this in much less time/distance driving around nearby Trieste or Bratislava.

Huh you’re right. Maybe I was remembering border to border air distance. Was looking this up a few years ago when friends were asking how far Ukraine was from my family.

Here’s a more fun context instead: after college I went on a roadtrip and covered 13 countries in about 4000 miles.

You started some sort of Europeshrinking conspiracy here, check out the sibling comment that's off by a similar factor but for area.

The UK is fairly small but has very different accents in different regions. Genetic history and accents both come from how far people travel, as far as I know, so as long as people don't go far they can remain separate.

Doesn’t have to be large groups to be different groups. That seems like a fallacious argument.

Empirically/anecdotally I bet quite a few people could with 90%+ accuracy pick a (third-generation) Iberian vs Frank vs Polack vs Scandi out of a lineup just by physical features

Alternatively take a reasonably deep look at American (North or South) indigenous tribal societies- the empirical history is thinner there but similar conclusions

> 90%+ accuracy pick a (third-generation) Iberian vs Frank vs Polack vs Scandi

If they have the same haircut, tan and clothes? Highly doubtful...

Someone posted a photo of eight Italian soccer players all wearing the same uniform and said “there is no meaningful difference between northern and southern Italians, try to tell them apart.”

I guessed, and got 7 of 8 correct. (The one I missed was Sardinian)

The average Swedish or Danish man is more than three inches taller than the average Spanish man.

That doesn’t mean much and wouldn’t be particularly useful when picking a limited number of people from a lineup (certainly not at at 90% accuracy)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_deviation

Europe may be small, yet there are measurable genetic differences between its peoples: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2735096/

Looking at a larger, but still relatively closely connected region, magnifies those differences further: https://site.nevgen.org/2020/05/05/autosomal-pca-charts-of-e...

> Europe is very small.

For another US reference point: the entire European Union is about the same size as Alaska.

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=area+of+alaska+vs+area+...

EU is a lot bigger than Alaska and there's a lot of Europe it doesn't cover.

Europe is not just the "European Union". I know many don't like Russia at the moment, but its western part is Europe. Same for Ukraine, also not part of the European Union, but it's part of Europe (the continent).

In the context of European "genetics" keeping Russia and Ukraine out of Europe is basically non-sense considering the Slavs kind of come from there :)

You might be replying to the wrong comment.

For a more accurate reference point, the EU's area is about 4.2 million km and the contiguous USA (so without Alaska etc) is about 8 million, so the EU is about half the area of the contiguous US.

Europe is 10 million km - why to skip some countries just because they are not part of a "political" union?

This article is about analysing the genetics of people living in Europe, so the entire continent must be considered and "historically" Europe extends until west Russia.

If you consider only the European Union, you kind of exclude the British, who share a lot with the rest of the continent.

To match the guy I was replying to, and because the USA is primarily a political, not geographical construct so it makes sense to compare it to another political construct in the EU.

In Mercator projection?

Genetic differences don't account for all differences between people. For a long time the Balkans were a borderlands between empires, and that often tends to introduce differences in culture, religion, and identity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divide_and_rule

if governance were a technical field (which it is)

that idea would be like a theorem

the remaining puzzle is who is really "ruling" the balkans?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com