Cultural Transmission And Gene Flows

Northwestern China, a land full of mystery, is rich in human genetic and linguistic resource. Interestingly, it is here that the Silk Road, a historical network of interlinking trade routes across the Afro-Eurasian landmass, snaked from its Eastern terminus at Xi’an across the mountains and deserts across Central Asia to Europe. Most of the ethnic groups, inhabit in this region, belong to Altai language family. Nevertheless, little has been known about the relationship between the genetic makeup of Altaic speaking populations and their languages.Firstly, we collected 964 male samples from 20 ethnic groups in the northwest of China, and surveyed 12 Y-chromosomal biallelic markers to reconstruct the paternal architecture. The result of multidimensional scaling analysis indicated that Tungusic Group and Turkic Group showed large genetic distances to each other, and the Mongolian Group was close to the Tungusic Group, somewhat apart from Turkic Group. Principal component analyses also confirmed the result. A phylogenetic tree signified a generally association between Y chromosomes of Altaic speaking populations and their linguistic affiliations, revealing a coevolution of Y chromosome diversity and languages in North-western China.Dongxiang is one of special ethnic groups of Gansu Province. Their language is one of the Mongolian languages of Altai language family. And their origin has long been controversial. The results of Cluster analyses (multidimensional scaling analysis, dendrograms, principal component analyses, and networks) of Dongxiang population and other ethnic groups indicated that Dongxiang people is much closer to the Central Asian ethnic groups than to the other Mongolian. Admixture analyses also confirmed the result. This suggests that Dongxiang people did not descend from Mongolian, but from the Central Asian ethnic groups that have spoken Persian or Turkic language. This mismatch between paternal genetic lineage and language classification might be explained by the elite-dominance model. The ancestral populations of Dongxiang could be the Central Asian ethnic groups assimilated by Mongolian in language and culture.Ethnic population Yugur is special for its language disunity. Turkic Yugur and Mongolic Yugur languages are spoken in either western or eastern population groups, respectively. Strong ethnic identity is sharing between two groups. Here, we trace the founding process of Yugur by analyzing paternal Y-chromosomes with fine resolution. Also, we applied a haplotype-sharing analysis approach to study the detail paternal origin of Yugur ethnic by comparing with Y-chromosomal data published earlier. Genetic divergence on frequencies of several Y-chromosome haplogroups suggested that Turkic-and Mongolic-speaking Yugur clans may have different origins before they merged into one unified ethnic group, participating with intense intermarriage. Our investigation suggested that modern Yugur population is an admixture between ancient Turkic, Mongolic, Tibetan, and Han populations. Also, the paternal lineage related to Turkic Khanate and Uygur Khanate was discussed.In this study, our results provide support for the existence of coevolution between genes and languages in North-western China, and confirm that the vast majority of Dongxiang and Yugur people’s paternal components can trace their ancestry to the immigrants from Central Asian and Northeast Asia during the different historical periods. Our findings may contribute to bridging the results and inferences from the fields of linguistics, genetics, and history.