Coll. Antropol. 24 (2000) 2: 303–307UDC 575.174.015.3(496.5)Original scientific paperHLA Class I
hrcak.srce.hr/index.php?show=clanak_download&id_clanak_jezik=15462.
Polymorphismin the Albanian PopulationZ. Grubi}1, V. Kerhin-Brkljai}1, E. ^euk-Jelii}1, S. Kuci2and A. Ka{telan11National Referral Organ Transplantation and Tissue Typing Center,University Hospital Center Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia Faculty of Medicine Pristina, Pristina, Kosovo
A B S T R A C TThe HLA class I polymorphism was studied in a sample of the Albanian population.Ninety-three unrelated healthy Albanians were typed for HLA-A, -B and -Cw antigensby standard microlyphocytotoxicity test. The antigens with the highest frequencies were:HLA-A2 (34.4%), A3 (14.5%) and A1 (12.4%); B51 (19.3%), B35 (12.4%) and B18(10.2%); Cw4 (16.2%), Cw7 (16.2%) and Cw6 (10.8%). The HLA haplotypes with highfrequency in Albanians included A2-B51 (4.3%), A2-B18 (2.4%), A2-B35 (2.4%),Cw4-B35 (7.6%), and Cw7-B18 (6.5%), which are not significantly different from theother neighboring populations. Low frequency of HLA-A1-B8 haplotype (1.1%) is notedin the Albanian population. The frequency of HLA-B27 antigen (1.1%) is one of the low-est frequencies observed in Caucasians. Such results are important in studies ofHLA-A1-B8, HLA-B27 and disease associations. These findings should be also useful inunderstanding the origin of Albanians, representing a base for future studies aboutHLA polymorphism in the Albanian population.The main characteristic of the HLAsystem is a great polymorphism, whichmakes it very useful for population stud-ies and for studying the origins of differ-ent ethnic groups1. It may also be used tosingle out populations. First, particularalleles are only observed in some popula-tions (e. g., HLA-A36, -A43 in Negroids)or some alleles are very frequent in manypopulations (e. g., HLA-A2)2. Second, the strong linkage disequlibrium betweenHLA alleles at two or three neighboring loci shows that certain combinations(HLA haplotypes) are characteristic infrequency of one or a large number of pop-ulations3.
Albanians are a very homogenous population, their history suggests that theydid not mix with neighboring popula-tions. It is assumed that Albanians haveIllyrian origin. The Illyrians are of special interest because there is no consensus regarding their origin, whether Illyrians were immigrants on the Balkanpeninsula or an autochthonous population4. Regardless to its origin, Illyrians together with Thracians, are one of theoldest populations which settled theSouth of Europe.
Here's a clear connect to our original ancestors. Another one too. www3.isrl.uiuc.edu/~junwang4/langev/localcopy/pdf/piazza06evolang.pdf.
DIFFUSION OF GENES AND LANGUAGESIN HUMAN EVOLUTIONALBERTO PIAZZADipartimento di Genetica, Biologia e Biochimica,Università di Torino,via Santena 19, 10126 Torino, Italyalberto.piazza@unito.itLUIGI CAVALLI SFORZADepartment of Genetics,Stanford University,Stanford, CA 94305,USAcavalli@stanford.eduIn a study by Cavalli-Sforza et al.
(1988), the spread of anatomically modernman was reconstructed on the basis of genetic and linguistic pieces of evidence:the main conclusion was that these two approaches reflect a common underlyinghistory, the history of our past still frozen in the genes of modern populations.
From a linguistic distance matrix whoseelements are the fraction of words with the same lexical root for any pair oflanguages and its transformation to make the matrix elements proportional totime of differentiation, we were able to reconstruct a linguistic tree. The root ofthe tree separates Albanians from the others, with a reproducibility rate (theerror in reconstructing the tree) of 71 percent. The next oldest branch isArmenian.
The simplest interpretation is that the language of the first migrant Anatolian farmers survives today in two direct descendants, Albanian and Armenian, which diverged from the oldest pre-Indo-European languages indifferent directions but remained relatively close to the point of origin. If we give to the first split the time depth of the beginning of the expansionof the pre-Indo-European Anatolian farmers, about 9,000 years ago, we can then calculate that the origin of the European branch dates to about 6,000 years ago......
The oldest languages, Armenian,Albanian and Greek, are among the oldest in both trees, but there is some disagreement in the relevant dichotomies. These are, however, those that have the highest errors in both trees, as shown by the percentage of agreement among repetitions of the analysis.The other discrepancy is the dichotomy of Celtic, which in our tree is the oldest of the European subfamilies, while in theirs the oldest is Balto-Slavic.Our bootstrap value is higher than in their tree, indicating our method hassmaller error in this part of the tree.
There is information from other disciplines that supports our tree for both discrepancies.If history can support some separation dates, though very weakly,geography may again be of help.
Albanian is weakly related to Indic Iranian,while in our tree it is nearest to the root, closest to Armenian and Greek, inagreement with geography. Given the long distance between Albania and southAsia, and the local tree uncertainty it may be better to make the first dichotomyof the tree as a branch leading to a trichotomy of Albania, Greece and Armenia,corresponding with what remains of the first spread of farmers from Anatolia,and another branch leading to all the rest, ...From a general point of view it is of some interest to explore how thelinguistic classification correlates with genetic data. Poloni et al. (1997) showed,for the Y chromosome, an important level of population genetics structure among human populations, mainly due to genetic differences among distinctlinguistic groups of populations. A multivariate analysis based on geneticdistances between populations shows that human population structure inferredfrom the Y chromosome corresponds broadly to language families (r = .567, P <.001), in agreement with autosomal and mitochondrial data. Times of divergenceof linguistic families, estimated from their internal level of geneticdifferentiation, are fairly concordant with current archaeological and linguistichypotheses. Variability of the p49a,f/TaqI Y polymorphic marker is alsosignificantly correlated with the geographic location of the populations (r = .613,P < .001), reflecting the fact that distinct linguistic groups generally also occupydistinct geographic areas. Comparison of Y-chromosome and mtDNApolymorphisms in a restricted set of populations shows a globally high level ofcongruence, but it also allows identification of unequal maternal and paternalcontributions to the gene pool of several populations....
The ties between biologyand linguistics were already evident since the times of Darwin, who in chapterXIV of his The Origin of Species wrote:“If we possessed a perfect pedigree of the mankind, a genealogical arrangement of the races of man would afford the best classification of thevarious languages now spoken throughout the world; and if all extinctlanguages, and all intermediate and slowly changing dialects, were to beincluded, such an arrangement would be the only possible one. Yet it mightbe that some ancient language had altered very little and had given rise tofew new languages, whilst others had altered much owing to the spreading,isolation, and state of civilization of the several co-descended races, and had
thus given rise to many new dialects and languages. The various degrees ofdifference between the languages of the same stock, would have to beexpressed by groups subordinate to groups; but the proper or even the onlypossible arrangement would still be genealogical; and this would be strictlynatural, as it would connect together all languages, extinct and recent, by theclosest affinities, and would give the filiation and origin of each tongue.“The increasing resolving power of modern genetic data makes it possible tofollow Darwin and to use the genetic phylogeny of our species to infer theearliest branches of a hypothetical linguistic tree. The most comprehensivegenetic phylogeny reconstructed in Cavalli-Sforza et al. (1988) was used byRuhlen (1994) to draw the tree of origin of human languages (some reference dates from genetic and archaeological evidence have been added). The oldestlinguistic families must be African: Khoisan is probably the oldest and Afro-Asiatic the most recent, while Niger-Kordofanian and Nilo-Saharian believed bysome linguists to descend from an ancestor tongue, and the Congo- Saharan,were probably spoken at an intermediate time. A more exhaustive discussion ofthis hypothetical tree can be found in Cavalli-Sforza (2000).
As the genetic data improves with the inclusion of more representatives from those geographicalareas of the world where the sampling is still scanty, the tree will be morecomplex but it is likely that its main features will remain unchanged.In conclusion, our present genome keeps the record of its past evolution with an impressive richness of detail that is also reflected by our languages. Genes and languages contribute to the understanding of human history byhighlighting human diversity; both are instrumental in giving some of the silent voices of our past a chance to be heard.
ReferencesAmmerman, A.J., Cavalli-Sforza, L.L (1984). Neolithic Transition and the Genetics ofPopulations in Europe.
Now, lets not forget what . Arnaiz-Villena, and his colleagues said about the 150 Greek men and their certain 'frequent' presence of an alele present only among Sub Saharan and E African samples.
;D
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=PubMed&Cmd=ShowDetailView&TermToSearch=11260506&ordinalpos=1&itool=Entrez System2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVAbstractPlus