Really fine grained genetic maps of Europe

A few years ago you started seeing the crest of studies which basically took several hundred individuals (or thousands) from a range of locations, and then extracted out the two largest components of genetic variation from the hundreds of thousands of variants. The clusters which fell out of the genetic data, with each point being an individual's position, were transposed onto a geographical map. The figure to the left (from this paper) has been widely circulated. You don't have to be a deep thinker to understand why things shake out this way; people are more closely related to those near than those far because gene flow ties populations together, and its power decreases as a function of distance. Of course the world isn't flat, and history perturbs regularities. Jews for example often don't shake out where they "should" geographically, because of their historical mobility contingent upon random and often capricious geopolitical or social pressures. The Hazara of Afghanistan have their ethnogenesis in the melange of peoples who were thrown together after the Mongol conquest of Central Asia and Iran in the 13th century, and the subsequent collapse of the Ilkhan dynasty. Though the Hazara have mixed with their Persian, Tajik and Pashtun neighbors, they still retain a strong stamp of Mongolian ancestry which means that they are at some remove on the "genetic map" from their geographical neighbors. So when interpreting these sorts of results you have two extreme dynamics operative. On the one hand you have an equilibrium state where gene flow is mediated through continuous but small flows of migration; women moving between villages, younger sons venturing out of the village in search of better opportunities. Then you have the random (or perhaps modeled as a poisson distribution) "shocks" which are attributed to world-historical (or region-historical) events which leave an outsized and often perplexing stamp and distort the genetic map from the geographic one. Sometimes the two are not in balance. In much of the New World and Australasia the native populations were genetically replaced by settlers from the outside. Thousands of years of genetic variation accumulated and shaped by localized gene flow events were wiped clean off the map by the demographic tsunami. Obviously that's an extreme scenario. The macroscale does not always render the microscale irrelevant in such a fashion. A new short paper in The European Journal of Human Genetics gives us an example. Genes predict village of origin in rural Europe: