Stone Age Scandinavians Were Lactose Intolerant
Thursday, April 1, 2010 - 12:14
in Paleontology & Archaeology
Researchers from Uppsala and Stockholm Universities say that the hunter-gatherers who inhabited the southern coast of Scandinavia 4,000 years ago were lactose intolerant. The conclusion suggests that today's Scandinavians are not descended from the Stone Age people in question but from a group that arrived later. Results of the research have been published in the journal BMC Evolutionary Biology. "This group of hunter-gatherers differed significantly from modern Swedes in terms of the DNA sequence that we generally associate with a capacity to digest lactose into adulthood," says Anna Linderholm, formerly of the Archaeological Research Laboratory, Stockholm University. read more