Quebecers of European origin have settled on the banks of the St. Lawrence and major rivers, a population genetics study confirms. But other topographical elements also shaped the demographic development.
“The Baie-Saint-Paul region of Charlevoix, hit by a meteorite 300 million years ago, allowed agriculture where we only found forests and mountains. From here, many settlers moved to Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean,” explains mathematician Simon Gravel of McGill University, co-author of an article in Science last July on the genetic evolution of Quebec’s population.
The article is the result of the work of a team of 11 international researchers led by postdoctoral researcher Luke Anderson-Trocmé and clearly shows the subgroups that settled in the different regions of Quebec from the 17th century onwards.
Fox River, New Brunswick, ca. 1930 McCord Museum, MP-0000.25.369, gift of Stanley G. Triggs / Public Domain
Highways of colonization
The descendants of the Charlevoix settlers followed the Saguenay and reached Roberval and Mistassini. And in Beauce, the Chaudière River played this role as a colonial road. In Bas-Saint-Laurent, the Ouelle River also enabled the population to spread.
Exception to this rule: Abitibi, which was settled somewhat later by people who came from different regions of Quebec and did not necessarily move up the Outaouais.
The mathematician, who runs a population genetics research laboratory, was particularly pleased that his model was perfectly transferable to reality in Quebec. “We wanted to document that topography plays a role in genetic distribution. That’s exactly what we found,” he says.
Chaudière Valley Goldfield, Beauce County, 1867 McCord Museum, MP-0000.1087.9, Gift of Stanley G. Triggs / Public Domain
Demographic Laboratory
Because of its cultural and religious past, Quebec is a preferred country for demographic and genetic research. “Since the beginning of colonization, the priests have recorded everything: weddings, births, deaths. These records were retained until the state took over this information. »
For their research, the authors analyzed four million Quebec civil records and genotypic data from 20,451 Quebecers of French descent. In total, almost 1.5 million individuals form the basis of the mathematical model.
Crossing the Bac in Pierreville, ca. 1910 McCord Museum, MP-0000.1136.12, gift of Stanley G. Triggs / Public Domain
With the exception of Iceland and Utah, this American state with a high Mormon density for which postmortem information is essential for worship, Quebec would be the best place in the world to study the genetic evolution of populations.
But the genetic tree the researchers have developed is just the first step in larger research aimed at tracking down the origins of certain inherited diseases.