title: The ancient Yakuts: a population genetic enigma.
abstract: This study is part of an ongoing project aiming at determining the ethnogenesis of an eastern Siberian ethnic group, the Yakuts, on the basis of archaeological excavations carried out over a period of 10 years in three regions of Yakutia: Central Yakutia, the Vilyuy River basin and the Verkhoyansk area. In this study, genetic analyses were carried out on skeletal remains from 130 individuals of unknown ancestry dated mainly from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century AD. Kinship studies were conducted using sets of commercially available autosomal and Y-chromosomal short tandem repeats (STRs) along with hypervariable region I sequences of the mitochondrial DNA. An unexpected and intriguing finding of this work was that the uniparental marker systems did not always corroborate results from autosomal DNA analyses; in some cases, false-positive relationships were observed. These discrepancies revealed that 15 autosomal STR loci are not sufficient to discriminate between first degree relatives and more distantly related individuals in our ancient Yakut sample. The Y-STR analyses led to similar conclusions, because the current Y-STR panels provided the limited resolution of the paternal lineages.
authors.affiliation: Institut de Médecine Légale, Laboratoire AMIS, CNRS UMR 5288, Université de Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France Laboratoire AMIS, CNRS UMR 5288, Université de Toulouse, Toulouse, France ckeyser@unistra.fr.
authors.forename: Christine
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Keyser
authors.affiliation: Institut de Médecine Légale, Laboratoire AMIS, CNRS UMR 5288, Université de Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France Laboratoire AMIS, CNRS UMR 5288, Université de Toulouse, Toulouse, France.
authors.forename: Clémence
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Hollard
authors.affiliation: Institut de Médecine Légale, Laboratoire AMIS, CNRS UMR 5288, Université de Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France.
authors.forename: Angela
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Gonzalez
authors.affiliation: Institut de Médecine Légale, Laboratoire AMIS, CNRS UMR 5288, Université de Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France.
authors.forename: Jean-Luc
authors.initials: JL
authors.lastname: Fausser
authors.affiliation: LIRMM, CNRS UMR 5506, Université Montpellier 2, Montpellier, France Institut de Biologie Computationnelle, Université de Montpellier, Montpellier, France.
authors.forename: Eric
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Rivals
authors.affiliation: Medical Institute, Yakutsk University, Sakha Republic, Russia.
authors.forename: Anatoly Nikolayevich
authors.initials: AN
authors.lastname: Alexeev
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire Evolution et Diversité Biologique, CNRS UMR 5174, Université de Toulouse, Toulouse, France.
authors.forename: Alexandre
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Riberon
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire AMIS, CNRS UMR 5288, Université de Toulouse, Toulouse, France.
authors.forename: Eric
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Crubézy
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire AMIS, CNRS UMR 5288, Université de Toulouse, Toulouse, France Institut Médico-Légal, Université Paris Descartes, Paris, France.
authors.forename: Bertrand
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Ludes
mesh_terms: D001483:Base Sequence; D001842:Bone and Bones / Q000737:chemistry; D041322:Chromosomes, Human, Y / Q000235:genetics*; D004272:DNA, Mitochondrial / Q000235:genetics* / Q000266:history; D005006:Ethnicity / Q000235:genetics* / Q000266:history*; D005580:Fossils; D005828:Genetics, Population; D006239:Haplotypes / Q000235:genetics; D049668:History, 15th Century; D049669:History, 16th Century; D049670:History, 17th Century; D049671:History, 18th Century; D049672:History, 19th Century; D006801:Humans; D016013:Likelihood Functions; D008297:Male; D018895:Microsatellite Repeats / Q000235:genetics; D008969:Molecular Sequence Data; D010375:Pedigree; D020641:Polymorphism, Single Nucleotide / Q000235:genetics; D017422:Sequence Analysis, DNA; D012800:Siberia
chemical_list: D004272:DNA, Mitochondrial
keywords: Yakuts; ancient DNA; kinship; short tandem repeats