16 Finally, the few NS populations that have been tested for GM are almost monomorphic for haplotype GM 1,17 5*. This represents an extreme differentiation compared with NC, which is explainable by rapid genetic drift through

isolation. Actually, NS populations are spread discontinuously over a vast geographic area extending from East (Ethiopia) to West (Mali) Africa throughout the Sahara Desert, and may have been submitted to repeated episodes of demographic contraction and gene flow with local neighbours, depending on climatic variation, which extensively modified the environments. Variation of GM has also been highly informative for anthropological studies in East Asia. A north–south genetic cline is clearly observed, with high frequencies of GM 1,17 21 and GM 1,2,17 21 and low frequencies of GM 1,3 5* in the north, the reverse situation being RAD001 observed

in the south. Here again, the linguistic information is relevant: we observe continuous genetic differentiations between (from one end of the cline to the other) Altaic, Japanese and Korean; North Tibeto-Burman; Northern Chinese (all Mandarin but Southeastern); Wu and Southeastern Mandarin; Southern Chinese and Southern Tibeto-Burman; and Austro-Asiatic, Tai-Kadai and Austronesian populations.17,18 However, contrary to the situation found in Africa, in East Asia the linguistic families are found in specific geographic areas and it is hard to establish whether the observed genetic patterns have mostly been shaped by linguistic or by geographic differentiations in the past. As discussed in more Carfilzomib ic50 detail below for the HLA polymorphism, GM genetic variation is compatible with the ‘pincer’ model of migrations from West Asia, suggesting that some populations followed a southern (maybe coastal) route through India to Southeast Asia, and others a route north to the Himalaya Mountains to Northeast Asia (although at a different period), both groups

of populations later intermixing through north–south migrations in East Asia. As for HLA, a higher level of internal diversity (higher heterozygosity) is observed in Northeast Asia compared with Southeast Asia, indicating higher levels Protein tyrosine phosphatase of gene flow, whereas Southeast Asian populations may have undergone rapid differentiation through genetic drift.19 Another crucial example pertains to the peopling history of Taiwan. In a previous study, we investigated the GM polymorphism of several Aboriginal populations from this island (Siraya, Pazeh, Taroko, Atayal, Tsou, Bunun and Puyuma, as well as Yami located in Lan-Yu island off the southeastern coast of Taiwan).20 We found a decrease in heterozygosity from (north)western to southern and southeastern regions (with a higher frequency of GM 1,3 (–23) 5* in the west, whereas GM 1,3 23 5* is (almost) fixed in the south and/or southeast).