[travel] Familiar faces and genetic subgroups

[mattbell]

The most interesting thing in Budapest for me was seeing a large number of people who resembled a Hungarian woman I dated back in college. Her look was fairly distinctive. Although I cannot easily describe it, I know it when I see it. What's interesting is that while 15% or so of the residents looked very close to the way she looked, the rest didn't resemble her at all. In a country with a long history of continuous habitation by the same group, there are probably substantial subgroups within each ethnic group – eg, the peasants kept separate from the noblemen, people from within a particular guild tended to intermarry etc.

Update: Accordiang to my Hungarian-Italian couchsurfing host, after a particularly devastating war many centuries ago, Hungary “purchased” a million peasants from Romania. So that might account for some of the genetic diversity. Ah, serfdom.

Comments

[easwaran.livejournal.com]

I recall the Hungarians saying, when I was there, that they are only slightly ethnically Hungarian, and have a lot of mixture of Slavic, Turkish, Romanian, and probably some German and Romany as well. Hungary didn't exist as an independent nation between 1254 (or something within a century of then) and 1919, except for a month or so in 1848. Of course, for most of the 19th century (especially after the brief stint of independence) they had a lot of autonomy from the rest of the Austrian empire, but still not a lot.