Dermatoglyphic variation among Finno‐Ugric speaking populations: Methodological alternatives

Abstract

Utilization of dermatoglyphics for population studies is apparently increasing, but methods vary widely among investigators. We investigate how different types of dermatoglyphic data can affect estimates of biological distance among Finno-Ugric speaking populations. Dermatoglyphic distances were calculated using the following categories of traits: 1) Finger ridge-counts (radial and ulnar count for each digit), 2) finger ridge-counts (largest count for each digit), 3) finger pattern types, 4) palm ridge-counts, 5) palm patterns, and 6) main-line terminations. In addition, we compare our distances with those of Heet, which rely heavily on summary characters. Distances are evaluated by comparing them to each other and to language and geographic distances. There is considerable variation in the pattern of relationships resulting from the different variable sets. Finger variables, whether ridge-counts or pattern classifications, agree well with each other. Palm patterns, main-lines, and finger variables show moderate agreement with each other, while palm ridge-counts agree poorly with all variable sets except main-lines. Heet's distances agree poorly with all other dermatoglyphic distances. Finger patterns and main-lines are most closely related to language distances, after controlling for geography, while correlations with geography generally disappear after controlling for language. Heet's distances have weak associations with language and geography. Finger variables and palm main-lines yield results which agree best with historical relationships among Finno-Ugric populations. Our results make it very clear that utilization of dermatoglyphics in population studies requires careful consideration of methods, and that summary measures of quantitative or qualitative data should be used with caution.

Dermatoglyphic variation in Europe

“…These conjectures are supported by Jantz et al (1992) who found that the correlation of phenetic distances with geographic distances were generally low and not significant, with the highest correlation occurring for finger-ridge counts, the lowest with mainline terminations and palm-ridge counts. If there are no correlations between phenetic and geographic distances, one would not expect spatial autocorrelation to be large or significant.…”

“…There appear to be no developmental factors causing high correlations between variables in different sets. In a study of correlation of distance matrices estimated from different categories of dermatoglyphic variables, Jantz et al (1992) found that most categories correlated only at a low level with other categories, but that finger patterns and finger counts were highly correlated, and palm patterns and mainline terminations were moderately correlated. Our present findings confirm these earlier results.…”

“…However, the absence of spatial structure in palm variables seems to indicate that palm variables are less useful and that they do not reflect the genetic structure of European populations. Jantz et al (1992) …”

“…The variables measured are described in Jantz et al (1992). They consist of 32 finger patterns (16 each ofthe right and left digits), 22 palm patterns (11 for each hand), and 38 mainline terminations (19 for each hand).…”

Palmar Intertriradial Ridge Counts in Sardinians

“…While there are many data about a-b ridge count (Floris and Sanna, 1982;Jantz and Webb, 1982;Pons, 1982), other palmar intertriradial ridge counts are relatively few (Jaeger, 1971;Knussmann, 1971;Hitzeroth and Brehme, 1974;Maté, 1975;Brehme et al, 1977;Dennis, 1977;Reichmann, 1978;Hitzeroth, 1979, 1980;Galaktionov et al, 1981;Gill et al, 1982;Babu, 1983;Gyenis, 1984;Karmakar and Malhotra, 1985;Hitzeroth et al, 1986;Jantz et al, 1988Jantz et al, -1992Brehme and Jantz, 1990;Arrieta et al, 1992;Marcellino, 1994-1995;Milicic and Rudan, 1991;Milicic and Vidovic, 2005;Reichmann, 1978;Deep Kumar and Ramachandraiah, 1991;Kamali, 1982;Reddy et al, 2004;Karmakar et al, 1996). The a-d ridge count in particular has been examined only in Asiatic populations (Basu, 1971;Chattopadhyay and Kushwaka, 1978;Balgir and Sharma, 1986;Narahari et al, 2008;Bhasin, 1970;Bansal et al, 1984;Chai, 1971), and in Sardinians (Floris, 1993;Floris and Sanciu, 1989), while data on persons from Bologna (Gualdi-Russo, 1987) from Galicia (Lodeiro Ainsua et al, 1985) and from Bulgaria (Tornjava-Randelov...…”