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Cavalli Sforza did some work regarding correlations between languages and gene markers. I would like to dedicate this thread to this subject. I will post and invite other posters to contribute to this thread...if they have some information within Africa and outside of Africa....
rasol Member # 4592
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I've read both History/Geography of human genes, and Genes, peoples and languages, by Sforza.
They are pioneering works in population genetics, and Sforza is a briliant scholar, but they are also outdated [early 90's] and in the case of peoples/Langages, over-reaching and simplistic.
There is a relationship between lineage and langauge, but the relationship is often more complex than Sforza might have wished/speculated on 20 years ago..
Habari Member # 14738
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Thanks Rasol, that's why I opened this thread with a question mark in the title, I would like to explore new studies regarding that subject...do you have some in mind?
A critical reading of genetic data analyses, specifically those of Y chromosome phylogeography and TaqI 49a,f haplotypes, supports the hypothesis of populations moving from the Horn or southeastern Sahara northward to the Nile Valley, northwest Africa, the Levant, and Aegean (13–15). The geography of the M35/215 (or 215/M35) lineage, which is of Horn/East African origin, is largely concordant with the range of Afroasiatic languages. Underhill et al. state that this lineage was carried from Africa during the “Mesolithic” (13). The distributions of the Afroasiatic branches and this lineage can best be explained by invoking movements that originated in Africa and occurred before the emergence of food production, as well as after.
Habari Member # 14738
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Perfect Rasol good start for the thread...I'll go through them...and it can be useful for other posters as well...
Habari Member # 14738
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Here is a 2005 article:
Contrasting patterns of Y chromosome and mtDNA variation in Africa: evidence for sex-biased demographic processes Elizabeth T Wood,Daryn A Stover, Christopher Ehret, Giovanni Destro-Bisol,Gabriella Spedini
To investigate associations between genetic, linguistic, and geographic variation in Africa, we type 50 Y chromosome SNPs in 1122 individuals from 40 populations representing African geographic and linguistic diversity. We compare these patterns of variation with those that emerge from a similar analysis of published mtDNA HVS1 sequences from 1918 individuals from 39 African populations. For the Y chromosome, Mantel tests reveal a strong partial correlation between genetic and linguistic distances (r¼ 0.33, P¼0.001) and no correlation between genetic and geographic distances (r¼À0.08, P40.10). In contrast, mtDNA variation is weakly correlated with both language (r¼0.16, P¼0.046) and geography (r¼ 0.17, P¼0.035). AMOVA indicates that the amount of paternal among-group variation is much higher when populations are grouped by linguistics (U CT ¼0.21) than by geography (U CT ¼0.06). Levels of maternal genetic among-group variation are low for both linguistics and geography (U CT ¼ 0.03 and 0.04, respectively). When Bantu speakers are removed from these analyses, the correlation with linguistic variation disappears for the Y chromosome and strengthens for mtDNA. These data suggest that patterns of differentiation and gene flow in Africa have differed for men and women in the recent evolutionary past. We infer that sex-biased rates of admixture and/or language borrowing between expanding Bantu farmers and local hunter-gatherers played an important role in influencing patterns of genetic variation during the spread of African agriculture in the last 4000 years. European Journal of Human Genetics (2005) 13, 867–876. doi:10.1038/sj.ej
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