title: Genetic history of the population of Corsica (western Mediterranean) as inferred from autosomal STR analysis.
abstract: To genetically reconstruct the demographic history of the human population of Corsica (western Mediterranean), we analyzed the variability at eight autosomal STR loci (FES, VWA, CSF1PO, TH01, F13A1, TPOX, CD4, and D3S1358) in a sample of 179 native blood donors from 4 out of the 5 administrative districts. The main line of genetic discontinuity inferred from the spatial distribution of STR variability overlapped the linguistic and geographic boundaries. In the innermost areas (Corte district) several estimators had larger stochastic effects on allele frequencies. Genetic distance measures underlying different evolutionary models all pointed to a higher variability within Corsicans than within the rest of the Mediterranean reference populations. All Corsican subsamples showed the highest distance with a pooled sample from central Sardinia, thus making recent gene flow between the two neighboring islands unlikely. Hierarchical AMOVA and distance-based multivariate genetic spaces stressed the closeness of Tuscan and Corsican frequency distributions, which could reflect peopling events with different time depths. Anyway, estimated separation times well support the linguistic hypothesis that Neolithic/Chalcolithic events have been far more important than Paleolithic or historical processes in the shaping of present Corsican variability.
authors.affiliation: Dipartimento di Etologia, Ecologia ed Evoluzione, Unità di Antropologia, Università di Pisa, Via S Maria 55, 56126 Pisa, Italy.
authors.forename: Sergio
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Tofanelli
authors.forename: Luca
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Taglioli
authors.forename: Laurent
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Varesi
authors.forename: Giorgio
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Paoli
mesh_terms: D000483:Alleles; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D005602:France; D005787:Gene Frequency; D018740:Genetic Heterogeneity; D005819:Genetic Markers; D014644:Genetic Variation; D005828:Genetics, Population; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D011110:Polymorphism, Genetic; D020080:Tandem Repeat Sequences / Q000235:genetics*
chemical_list: D005819:Genetic Markers