The alliance of anthropology and populations genetics

Abstract

Introduction. Russian population genetics arose in the depths of anthropology. Over time, the rapid development of genetic technologies created a tension between these two fields of science. In hope to strengthen the long-standing alliance between anthropology and genetics, this work attempts to describe some aspects of genetic characteristics that genetics deals with, discuss the problem of sample representativeness for so diverse genetic features, and explain how methods harnessed by both sciences are used in genetics. The main focus of the article is on ADMIXTURE, a method of ancestry estimation which makes use of paleogenetic data and is well known to paleoanthropologists.

Results and discussion. Our study shows how this method can benefit the ethnic anthropology of modern populations. We provide examples of PCA and ancestral component analysis for different regions (the Russian North, the Far East, Northern Eurasia) and for different tasks. ADMIXTURE can quantitatively estimate the contributions of racial and anthropologic components on different hierarchical levels; its estimates are based on huge arrays of independent genetic markers.

Conclusion. Only a small part of the extensive research field that both anthropology and genetics deal with is discussed in this paper. But if our attempt boosts collaboration between geneticists and anthropologists, the mission of this paper can be considered accomplished. © 2024. This work is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 license

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