If you use data from polymorphisms in all the chromosomes, and not only the uniparental markers you will see that the germans or danish are closer to galicians, and the galicians are not anglo-saxons nor vikings, but a population of southwestern europe. So I think the similarity between english and continental german-danish haplotypes maybe comes from the neolithics or post-neolithic events. 
In other words, the culturally celtic britons could be genetically closer to the germanic populations, and the culturally celtic welsh closer to irish. 
 
The data from autosomal SNP are in : 
 
http://bioinformatics.cesga.es/snpforid/ 
 
If you make a excel correlation analysis you will find it.

" the question is what flavor of ice age european, those predominantly from the iberian refugia (celts) or ukranian refugia (germans)" 
 
The slavish populations like polish, russians... came from the ukrainian refuge. The germans are an admixture of R1b( western) + I1a( also western) + R1a( eastern) in a minor proportion. Just like the french, galicians, british or USA caucasians: 
 
http://www.familytreedna.com/pdf/HammerFSIinpress.pdf 
 
The analysis of y chromosome haplotypes puts the british like a typical western european population and not a nordic germanic one. 
 
What is wrong here?  
 
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/tcga/tcgapdf/capelli-CB-03.pdf

Good revision of the british History, although you forget a comparable episode in the western european history, the suevi in Galicia: celts plus romans plus germanic invaders.  
 
If you make a comparative search of a typical british and a north-portuguese, and then friesian populations in www.yhrd.org ( y chromosome haplotypes database) you will see this: 
 
 
http://img220.imageshack.us/img220/961/londonnorthernportugalyf2.png 
 
http://img84.imageshack.us/img84/7481/frieslandlondonjl5.png 
 
The majority of english population is actually of briton offspring( western europeans like the western French, Galicians or Basques). 
 
Lugus still lives in Britannia. 
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lugus

Do you know this? 
 
http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/JASSS.html 
 
http://www.agsm.edu.au/~bobm/teaching/SimSS.html 
 
" Simulating Ideologies" 
 
http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/1/4/5.html 
 
Economics: 
 
http://www.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/ace.htm 
 
Maths + Computers= my artificial paradise.

The origin of I1a and R1b haplogroups in Western Europe is in franco-cantabrian refugium, but is this true for the finns as well? 
Maybe a R1b sublineage could be of eastern-southeastern european origin( like in Greece). 
However, the iberian origin of some mtDNA of finns and saami offer curious surprises: 
 
http://www.familytreedna.com/pdf/U_paper.pdf 
 
Berbers and Scandinavians united by their common western european( galician-basques) ancestors!

" I just find it amusing that someone from Galicia wants to be related to them" 
Well I find it very amusing too but it is a simple correlation analysis from the data : 
 
www.snpforid.org 
 
Is it so amusing for you to be american-english or english? I hope it. This world is a amusing place for all! 
I like Rammestein, however, any problem?

" Gallegos are not known to be blond and blue eyed" 
 
Yes, we are predominantly brown or black-haired like the italians or basques, although very pale-faced too. But there is a GAP between the physical appearance and the genetic proximity. 
We are living in SOUTHwestern europe, and probably in the last millennia there was not a very intense selective pressures for blondism. 
The superficial aspect is not a good proxy for establishing phylogenetic relations in europe, the main gradient is southeast-northwest and not simply north-south or " nordics vs. mediterraneans".  
We have a very good wine, yes, but I prefer our beer( you know, my suevians alleles I guess).

Press on:  
" New: the SNPforID browser", and you will get the frequencies of 52 autosomal SNP in several world populations. Galicia= Northwestern spain.

A similar data from Sweden( not SNP but STRs): 
 
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=15978763&query_hl=1&itool=pubmed_docsum 
 
And now more and more SNPs: 
 
http://isogg.org/tree/ISOGG_YDNA_SNP_Index.html 
 
http://isogg.org/tree/ISOGG_All_Papers.html 
 
http://www.scs.uiuc.edu/~mcdonald/WorldHaplogroupsMaps.pdf 
 
You can do a Principal Component Analysis of these data: 
 
www.snpforid.org 
 
I did it, and my conclusion on European Populations is that we the Galicians are not a mediterranean or celtic population, but a continental-germanic one. We are closer to danish or germans than irish or british, although Galicia is in the southwestern atlantic corner of Europe. 
So, Long live to Wagner, and Rammstein!

What about the affinities of atlantic populations of europe? 
I would expect to find more affinities between galicians and ancient britons( from a common source in paleolithic times), that a common nordic paleolithic mtDNA from britain to estonia, according these work: 
 
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu...4/ 41464.web.pdf 
 
http://www.nature.com/ejhg/journ...s/ 5200202a.html 
 
Is there any reference in the article to the Glacial Refugium populations like galicians or basques? 
I have my doubts about the identification of " saxon" or viking mtDNA. For exemplo the H1 and H3 subhaplogroups in England could be of paleolithic( galicians), swedish-viking or saxon( medieval age) or recent continental origin( frenchs from Gascoigne). How can you distinguish their true origin? 
I think there are not a distinctive suevian, roman or paleolithic mtDNA haplogroups in Galicia, because all these invaders came from continental europe in ancient and more recent times. 
I don't have access to the whole article but I have my doubts about this sharing nordic paleolithic mtDNA, it is in contradiction with the North Iberian paleolithic Refugium.

The fluidity of germanic or slavic identities in early medieval Europe was very important. As a Galician I speak a language derived from latin with a celtic or western indo-european influence. But Galicia was also the first Germanic Kingdom in Western Europe, the Suebic Kingdom of Gallaecia: 
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suevi 
 
Despite this fact, you can only detect this Suebic or Germanic identity of Galicians in our rural popular culture( feasts, traditions) and a few words( luva=gloove, brétema,...). So, apparently the Suebi People disapeared from the scene of Europe like the Alans or the Vandals. 
 
" There are plenty of groups like the Alans and the Avars who at a time played a significant role in history, but seem to have left no lasting legacy." 
 
Well, I do not agree in this case: I feel the lasting legacy of Suebi Nation was the National Identity of Galiza like a truly Nation in the Iberian Peninsula and Western Europe: 
 
http://countrystudies.us/spain/38.htm 
 
I am , at least partially, of suebic offspring, and this is a good motivation for the defense of our culture and language against spanish cultural and political imposition.  
So, the ancient frontier of the Suebic Kingdom still lives for us, and the ancient battles became political struggles between Galicians Parties and pro-spanish coalitions in our territory.  
 
The Suebic identity: 
 
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/emed/1998/00000007/00000001/art00016

"Very subtle differences like a single nucleotide polymorphism explain behavioural differences between humans:" 
 
You mean 'correlate', not 'explain'. The very hard part is going from the former to the latter.  
 
Note that I'm not saying that it's impossible to find the important changes (than I might as well change fields).. just that it's unlikely that we'll find an asymmetry in human-chimp molecular divergence that is as striking as the phenotypic divergence. 
 
As for your last question, I think this is really the discussion the community needs to get away from: 
 
"Eighty percent of proteins are difference between human and chimp" 
 
"Wow, that's a lot" 
 
"But they differ by only one or two amino acids each" 
 
"Wow, that's not very much" 
 
"And overall we're 99% chimps" 
 
"Wow, that's not very different either" 
 
"But that translates to almost 40 MILLION sequence difference" 
 
"WOW, that's a lot" 
 
Etc...

(Hmmm, Hilde responded before I could. I?ll post my musings and then read through the links Hilde provided.) 
 
Old School: ?If there aren't that many sequence changes, there won't be many gene expression change.? 
 
I believe scientists will discover there are many sequence differences in the non-coding DNA that are very important. 
 
There seems to be twice as much non-coding DNA under selection as coding DNA in the human genome. Furthermore, short segments of the DNA (around 14 base pairs) can regulate gene expression. Lot of potential for extensive gene regulation. 
 
Micro-RNA interference with mRNA and intron control of alternate RNA splicing have only be recognized as significant in the last decade. Other factors such as DNA tertiary structure are also known to play a role. My guess is that scientific modeling of the genome is far from complete. 
 
I wonder how many scripts our genome could support. 
 
Consider an insect with several life stages, each stage having a specialized body and behaviors. Or the development of the fetus where genetic scripts generate a sequence of shapes. Or fish changing gender based on environmental signals. 
 
How robust are the scripts? If a script were seldom triggered would it disappear due to mutation? 
 
Scripts would be built on top of other scripts. The low-level scripts would be relatively fixed since so many high-level systems depend upon them. (As with coding DNA, regulatory DNA could duplicate and diverge.) So small DNA segments might code for high-level scripts that seldom activate. Since the segments are short, the chance of a mutation is small. So even rarely used scripts might be retained under selection. (Abundant food could trigger early puberty. Other conditions might switch the ratio of male to female births. Different conditions could trigger different mating strategies.)

"Since dogs and wolves are nearly identical at the level of DNA sequence, we hypothesize that the two species may differ in patterns of gene expression" 
 
This always strikes me as a somewhat silly argument going all the way back to (likely over-interpretations of) King & Wilson. If we don't see "smoking guns" at the sequence level, they must be in gene expression, right?  
 
The only reason that idea is so prevalent is that we just haven't been able to measure gene expression differences, and so it is easy to image how they will correspond beautifully to phenotypic differences. But gene expression differences come from sequence changes, nothing else. If there aren't that many sequence changes, there won't be many gene expression change.  
 
Enough of this sequence vs. expression nonsense.

Greetings from Galicia( a small country in the fringe of Atlantic Europe). 
I think there is a complex and context-dependent relationship between the languages and genes, i.e. the migrations and invasions of peoples and their cultural relevance.  
The degree of social organization and cultural achievement of a territory prior to an invasion is a factor that probably is more important that the simply number of invaders in determining what culture or language will survive in the next generations. 
For example, in early medieval Western Europe and after the germanic migrations: Britannia became England with a anglosaxon language, Roman Gaul became France but with a latin-derived language. 'France' and 'England' are names of germanic origin but ' english' and 'french' are not germanic languages both, obviously. In Gaul, the germanics invaders gave their name to the country( France, from land of Francs) but not their language.  
 
In my own country, after the Roman Conquest it became Gallaecia, a probably celtic word latinised, and then after the Suevic( germanic) migrations became Galiza( or Galicia, Galice). That is, in the last 2000 years in a very small territory of Western Europe you could find three different indo-european languages ( celtic, latin, germanic) without a considerable mass migration of Romans or Germans here. In fact, we are still very closed to the irish in genetics terms( y chromosome, mtDNA: 
 
http://www.hnn.us/blogs/entries/7406.html 
 
But the galicians do not speak english or gaelic, of course.  
 
Therefore, I think that every specific situation requires a very individual analysis of the network of complex influences: economic, cultural, political and demographic factors underlying the survival of languages and cultures in a given territory. 
Excuses for my english, but you should realise that this night I have a struggle of romans, barbarians, celts and germanics warriors fighting inside my head :-)