Interesting and timely article for me personally, as a Polish + Lemko [1] American. The other day I spent a bit of time diving into the DNA results I got back from one of those ancestry services. Apparently, while the vast majority of my results say I'm Eastern European / Slavic / Pannonian etc. (depends on the service), my specific fatherline and motherline are both pre-Slavic: one Celtic/Roman and the other Ice Age hunter-gatherer.
From my own research and this article, this seems to be a rare situation? Or I guess the fatherline and motherline are still pretty small percentages, so that lines up with the "minor traces" mentioned.
In Poland specifically, the research overturns earlier ideas of long-term population continuity. Genetic results show that starting in the 6th and 7th centuries CE, the region’s earlier inhabitants—descendants of populations with strong links to Northern Europe and Scandinavia in particular—almost entirely disappeared and were successively replaced by newcomers from the East, who are closely related to modern Poles, Ukrainians, and Belarusians. This conclusion is reinforced by the analysis of some of the earliest known Slavic inhumation graves in Poland, excavated at the site of Gródek, which provide rare and direct evidence of these early migrants. While the population shift was overwhelming, the genetic evidence also reveals minor traces of mixing with local populations. These findings underscore both the scale of population change and the complex dynamics that shaped the roots of today’s Central and Eastern European linguistic landscape.
From my own research and this article, this seems to be a rare situation? Or I guess the fatherline and motherline are still pretty small percentages, so that lines up with the "minor traces" mentioned.
In Poland specifically, the research overturns earlier ideas of long-term population continuity. Genetic results show that starting in the 6th and 7th centuries CE, the region’s earlier inhabitants—descendants of populations with strong links to Northern Europe and Scandinavia in particular—almost entirely disappeared and were successively replaced by newcomers from the East, who are closely related to modern Poles, Ukrainians, and Belarusians. This conclusion is reinforced by the analysis of some of the earliest known Slavic inhumation graves in Poland, excavated at the site of Gródek, which provide rare and direct evidence of these early migrants. While the population shift was overwhelming, the genetic evidence also reveals minor traces of mixing with local populations. These findings underscore both the scale of population change and the complex dynamics that shaped the roots of today’s Central and Eastern European linguistic landscape.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemkos