European Genetic Diversity through Space and Time

This special issue of Human Heredity has been stimulatedby a scientific meeting held in Geneva, Switzerland,in January 2013 as the closing conference of a EuropeanCOST Action (BM0803), also supported by the Swiss NationalScience Foundation. The main objective of the conferencewas to round up our knowledge on the geneticdiversity and origins of European populations, by takinginto account both ancient and modern molecular dataand sophisticated data analyses and computer simulationmethods that have been developed in the last few decadeswithin the frame of population genetics. As suggested bythe subtitle of this issue, the questions we address(ed) arerelated both to the demographic history of Europeanpopulations, a subject still at the centre of a heated scientificdebate, and to the clinical consequences and implicationsof such a history, in terms of risk factors in bothnatural and clinical contexts