Talk about obnoxious...

[Occhidiangela]

Well, the territory Russia is enormous, and is much larger than any ethnic group's original space. To reduce it to Vikings + Mongols is to miss the vast majority of the ethnic mix, including the most important one: Slavs.
-Jester
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And what about the Scythians? :w00t: No love for them?

I find puzzling the habit of selectively choosing genetic groups for establishing identity. How do you account for the mestizo, who evolved over less than two centuries? The mixing in what we today call Russia has been going on for well over a millenium. It isn't just blood, it is culture. When cultures collide, they sometimes mix, and sometimes bounce off of each other, and more often do something in between. I see no imperative for a culture to be preserved. It either has value and resilience, or becomes over time redundant and/or obsolete.

Where does your model account for Scots and Irish, who are (allegedly) proto Celts?

Where does it account for the Slavs (Southern) in Yugoslavia, as it broke up, whose core differences are almost purely cultural rather than blood related?

Occhi