The Rh Negative Blog

The Western Islanders of Norway

As I have mentioned many times, regional data is far more informative than national data.

The latest and often overlooked addition to our list are the Western Islands of Norway.

          The highest percentage is found among some of the tribes still living in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco (40%). The next highest are the Basques, reported in different publications as having 25 and 32%, depending on location. The people of northwest Ireland, the Highland Scots and the western islanders of Norway all have between 16 and 25%, while the Lapps of Norway and Finland have between 5 and 7%. In addition, Cavalli-Sforza reports two small isolated populations of the same tribe, one in Chad and another in Senegal, each with about 25%. On his map, he shows an Rh-negative population in Chad, still living near the formerly enormous Chad lake. Only part of this lake still exists on the spot where the boundaries of Chad, Niger, Nigeria and Cameroon meet. These people may originally have been the sailors on Chad lake. Could it be that this is the original location of the Rh-negative population that then moved to Morocco and Algiers to become the Berbers? Or would it be the other way around?

https://faculty.ucr.edu/~legneref/bronze/seapeopl.htm#N25

Remember this?

New data indicates many of those claimed frequencies to be substantially higher than above indicated.

Northern Ireland for example seems to be above 27% Rh negative. Northwest Ireland is also the region with highest R1b y-DNA frequencies worldwide. Scotland has regions where more than 30% are Rh negative.

Have those frequencies increased in the past few decades?