Previous research says that the persistent regional mortality differences in Finland cannot be attributed to socio-demographic factors, health behaviours, or living conditions at young age. Using longitudinal population register data from Finland, we analyse the effect of birth region and ethnicity on mortality risks in men aged 65-74 years and women aged 75-84 years. Mortality from ischemic heart disease in particular is found to be highly influenced by these proxies for people’s ancestry. The results are consistent with findings from population genetic and medical research, which say that there is great genetic diversity across major regions in the country and that this diversity may underlie variation in disease susceptibility. We argue that the regional mortality variation might reflect geographic clustering of hereditary factors, enforced by Finland’s specific population development. The paper illustrates that large-scale population register data without genetic information or biomarkers can be useful for understanding cause-specific mortality within a national population.

Walker et al. (2006) used life-history theory to develop an innovative explanation for human diversity in stature. Short stature could have been selected for in some human populations due to the advantage of an earlier growth cessation and earlier reproduction in a context of high mortality. Migliano et al. (2007) recently published an important article that tested this hypothesis to explain short stature in human pygmy populations. However innovative this work may be, we felt that some data and results presented herein were controversial if not questionable. As problematic points we note 1) the use of an arbitrary threshold of height (155cm) to categorize populations into pygmies and non-pygmies; 2) the use of demographic data from Philippine pygmy groups that have experienced dramatic cultural and environmental changes in the last 20 years and 3) the use of demographic data concerning African pygmy groups since good systematic data on these groups is not available. Finally we report here mathematical errors and loopholes in the optimisation model developed by the authors. In this paper we suggest alternative trade-offs that can be used to explain the authors’ results on more reliable bases.

The aim of the study was to individualize potential differences between two cranial regions in differentiating human populations. The neurocranium and the facial skeleton were compared to each other. Skulls from the Great Hungarian Plain were examined. They are dated back to the 1st – 11th centuries, a long space of time that encompasses seven archaeological periods. We analyzed six neurocranial and seven facial measurements. The reduction of the number of variables was carried out by Principal Components Analysis. Linear mixed-effects models (LMM) were fit to the principal components of each archaeological period, and then the models were compared by multiple pairwise tests. The neurocranium showed significant differences in seven cases between non-subsequent periods, and, in one case, between two subsequent populations. In the case of the facial skeleton, no significant results were found. Our results, which are also compared to previous craniofacial heritability estimates, suggest that the neurocranium is a more conservative region, and population differences can be pointed out better by the neurocranium than by the facial skeleton.

Why and how have languages died out? A mathematical model is devised to help understand how languages go extinct. We use the model to ask whether language extinction could be prevented in future, and why it may have occurred in the past.  Despite a growing number of mathematical models of language dynamics that study the conditions for language co-existence and death, their phenomenological approach compromises their ability to influence language revitalization policy. In contrast, here we model the mechanisms underlying language competition and how these are influenced by specific language revitalization interventions, namely private interventions to raise the status of the language and thus promote language learning at home, public interventions to increase the use of the minority language, and explicit teaching of the minority language in schools. Our model reveals that it is possible to preserve a minority language, but that continued long-term interventions are likely to be necessary. We identify the parameters that determine which interventions work best under certain linguistic and societal circumstances. In this way the efficacy of interventions of various types can be identified and predicted. Although there are qualitative arguments for these parameter values (e.g. the responsiveness of children to learning a language as a function of the proportion of conversations heard in that language, the relative importance of conversations heard in the family and elsewhere, and the amplification of spoken to heard conversations of the high-status language due to media), extensive quantitative data are lacking in this field. We propose how these parameters could be measured, allowing our model, as well as others models in the field, to be validated.