If Iceland is one of the most homogeneous countries in the world at the genetic level (which makes it a phenomenal natural laboratory on genetics), a new study carried out by researchers from the ‘Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute’ and their colleagues at the University of Oxford, in United Kingdom, they have just identified the least homogeneous, the most diverse.
That title corresponds to Papua New Guinea .
Genetic diversity
According to the aforementioned study, published in Science , the people of this country have been genetically independent of Europe and Asia for most of the last 50,000 years, and the people of the country from the isolated mountainous region have been completely independent even up to the present.
The researchers studied the genomes of 381 New Guinean people from 85 different language groups within the country, and the result was that they were strikingly genetically distinct from each other .
With about 850 national languages, representing more than 10% of the world total , Papua New Guinea is also the most linguistically diverse country in the world. Hence, Papua New Guinea could show the genetic, cultural and linguistic diversity that many established human societies would have had prior to their convergence.