Population Substructure and Patterns of Quantitative Variation among the Gollas of Southern Andhra Pradesh, India

Abstract

Population substructure and biological differentiation was studied among the Golla, a pastoral caste living in the southern areas of Andhra Pradesh (AP) in India, using 11 anthropometric measurements and 20 quantitative dermatoglyphic variables. The data were collected from a sample of 334 adult males drawn from 30 villages distributed in the Chittoor district of AP, who belonged to 8 endogamous subunits of the same caste. Multiple discriminant analysis of the anthropometrics suggests a highly significant degree of discrimination that is consistent with the microgeographic variations of the groups. In contrast, in different sets of dermatoglyphs discrimination is low and generally inconsistent with both the geographic and ethnohistorical affiliations of the groups. These findings are reflected in the F ST value for anthropometry, which is more than double the value of dermatoglyphs. The patterns of gene flow as inferred through the regression of phenotypic variance on the distance of groups from the centroid is not generally consistent with the known backgrounds in the case of either dermatoglyphs or anthropometry. It is concluded that at the level of caste substructure representing the lowest level of population hierarchy, the quantitative variables examined here may not portray a complete picture of the historical process of subdivision. The results of this study are not in congruence with those based on another study of 13 short tandem repeat loci on the same set of populations (Reddy et al. 2001), which may provide better insights into the population structure and history of subdivision that are consistent with the known ethnohistorical backgrounds of the populations.India offers immense scope and a variety of situations to study the processes of population subdivision and their microevolutionary significance. India's population structure is remarkable in that the population is divided into a large number of strictly defined endogamous castes, tribes, and religious groups. However, most unique and fundamental to the Indian population structure is the existence

Anthropological significance of dermatoglyphic trait variation: an intra-Tunisian population analysis.

“…In fact, dermatoglyphs are used as easily accessible tool to assess genetically determined diseases (Miliĉiċ et al, 2003;Temaj et al, 2009). Moreover, dermatoglyphics have been used extensively to characterize human populations and most studies have focused on dermatoglyphic variables within and between various populations across the world (Crawford and Duggirala, 1992;Demarchi et al, 1997;Reddy et al, 2001;Weisensee and Siváková, 2003;Arrieta, 2003) or between sexes (Esteban and Moral, 1993;Kusuma et al, 2002). In the latter and in more recent studies, the dermatoglyphic traits are used for estimating the genetic distances between populations (Temaj et al, 2009;Cheng et al, 2009).…”

Short-tandem repeat analysis in seven Chinese regional populations

“…Over the past decades, and based on STR polymorphisms, important information has contributed to elucidating the history of human populations (Jorde et al , 1997; Shriver et al , 1997), as well as genetic microdifferentiation among local subdivided populations (Reddy et al , 2001). In the current study, seven Chinese Han populations, with three representative groups from the northern portion and four from the southern, were investigated, by comparing the allele frequency of 13 STR loci, whereby the following consequential information was obtained.…”

New Directions in Bioarchaeology: Recent Contributions to the Study of Human Social Identities

“…Such analytical developments place analysis of paleomorphological microevolution within a population genetic framework and, under certain circumstances, are model bound in that parameters from theoretical models are directly estimated from the data (Relethford and Blangero 1990;Relethford and Lees 1982). These more sophisticated approaches have almost completely supplanted traditional multivariate statistical approaches for landmark data, including anthropometric (e.g., Jantz and Meadows 1995;Konigsberg and Ousley 1995;Reddy et al 2001), craniometric (e.g., Jose et al 2002Powell and Neves 1999;Steadman 1998;Tatarek and Sciulli 2000), and odontometric variables (e.g., Scherer 2007;Stojanowski 2004Stojanowski , 2005a. While promising, quantitative R-matrix analysis was developed for use with near contemporaneous populations, and its use in archaeological contexts should be used sparingly unless the following four conditions are met: (1) the populations are roughly contemporary and could reasonably have exchanged mates, (2) the populations can reasonably be considered part of a regional mating network, (3) the archaeological samples are of similar temporal duration, and (4) the archaeological samples have similar use histories (temporal variation) and burial catchment areas (geographic variation).…”