Edgar Heather J H
Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, 87131, USA.
Am J Phys Anthropol. 2009 May;139(1):58-67. doi: 10.1002/ajpa.20961.
Folk taxonomies of race are the categorizations used by people in their everyday judgments concerning the persons around them. As cultural traditions, folk taxonomies may shape gene flow so that it is unequal among groups sharing geography. The history of the United States is one of disparate people being brought together from around the globe, and provides a natural experiment for exploring the relationship between culture and gene flow. The biohistories of African Americans and European Americans were compared to examine whether population histories are shaped by culture when geography and language are shared. Dental morphological data were used to indicate phenotypic similarity, allowing diachronic change through United States history to be considered. Samples represented contemporary and historic African Americans and European Americans and their West African and European ancestral populations (N = 1445). Modified Mahalanobis' D(2) and Mean Measure of Divergence statistics examined how biological distances change through time among the samples. Results suggest the social acceptance for mating between descendents of Western Europeans and Eastern and Southern European migrants to the United States produced relatively rapid gene flow between the groups. Although African Americans have been in the United States much longer than most Eastern and Southern Europeans, social barriers have been historically stronger between them and European Americans. These results indicate that gene flow is in part shaped by cultural factors such as folk taxonomies of race, and have implications for understanding contemporary human variation, relationships among prehistoric populations, and forensic anthropology.
种族的民间分类法是人们在日常判断身边人时所使用的分类方式。作为文化传统，民间分类法可能会影响基因流动，从而使在共享地理区域的群体之间的基因流动不均衡。美国历史是一部来自全球各地的不同人群汇聚在一起的历史，为探索文化与基因流动之间的关系提供了一个自然实验。通过比较非裔美国人和欧裔美国人的生物史，来检验在地理和语言共享的情况下，人口历史是否受文化影响。利用牙齿形态学数据来表明表型相似性，从而能够考虑美国历史上的历时变化。样本代表了当代和历史上的非裔美国人和欧裔美国人以及他们的西非和欧洲祖先群体（N = 1445）。修正的马氏距离D(2)和离散度平均测量统计分析了样本之间的生物距离如何随时间变化。结果表明，西欧后裔与移民到美国的东欧和南欧人之间的通婚在社会上被接受，这使得这些群体之间产生了相对快速的基因流动。尽管非裔美国人在美国的时间比大多数东欧和南欧人长得多，但历史上他们与欧裔美国人之间的社会障碍更强。这些结果表明，基因流动部分地受到诸如种族民间分类法等文化因素的影响，并且对于理解当代人类变异、史前群体之间的关系以及法医人类学具有重要意义。
