Human Biology

This study aimed to determine the changing prevalence of consanguineous marriage in India between two national-level surveys. The primary hypothesis was whether region of residence and religious affiliation continue to play a significant role in determining consanguineous marriage even after controlling other potentially significant confounding variables. Data from the 81,781 and 85,851 ever-married women during the National Family and Health Surveys (NFHS) survey periods 1992-1993 (NFHS-1) and 2015-2016 (NFHS-4), respectively, were used in the analysis...

Six blood groups (Rh, MN, Duffy, Kidd, Kell, and Lutheran) were investigated among three major ethnic groups (Bosniaks, Bosnian Croats, and Bosnian Serbs), as well as 10 regional subpopulations across Bosnia and Herzegovina (B&H): Krajina; Posavina; northeastern, eastern, middle, and central Bosnia; Sarajevo region; eastern, central, and western Herzegovina. This is the first study that introduces the molecular genetic typing of five blood groups within the B&H population, with the exception of the RhD blood group...

Haplogroup Q originated in Eurasia around 30,000 years ago. It is present in Y-chromosomes from Asia and Europe at rather low frequencies. Since America is undoubtedly one of the continents where this haplogroup is highly represented, it has been defined as one of the founding haplogroups. Its M3 clade has been early described as the most frequent, with pan-American representation. However, it was also possible to find several other haplogroup Q clades at low frequencies. Numerous mutations have been described for haplogroup Q, allowing analysis of its variability and assignment of its geographic origin...

Children of consanguineous unions carry long runs of homozygosity (ROH) in their genomes, due to their parents' recent shared ancestry. This increases the burden of recessive disease in populations with high levels of consanguinity and has been heavily studied in some groups. However, there has been little investigation of the broader effect of consanguinity on patterns of genetic variation on a global scale. This study, which collected published genetic data and information about marriage practice from 395 worldwide populations, shows that reported preference for cousin marriage has a detectable association with the distribution of long ROH in this sample, increasing the expected number of ROH longer than 10 cM by a factor of 2...

The humanitarian crisis on the US-Mexico border is a long-standing and evolving crisis in which nearly 8,000 deaths have been reported in the last two decades. These deaths are largely distributed across the Arizona-Mexico and Texas-Mexico border regions, where demographic trends for immigrants attempting to cross into the United States have shifted dramatically. The demographic change and volume of immigrants seeking shelter in the United States present new challenges for the forensic practitioners entrusted with the identification of individuals who lose their lives during the final segment of their journey...

Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islanders, and the environment they are in relationship with, have been the targets of exploitation, extraction, and destruction. Environmental atrocities throughout the Pacific have demonstrated how imperialism, capitalism, and white supremacy drive destruction through efforts to dominate and exploit for material gain. The relationship between Pacific people and the environment, which defines who they are socially, spiritually, and ancestrally, continues to be damaged and even severed by these injustices...

Climate change and human activities continue to result in negative environmental impacts that alter land productivity, ecosystem health, and their potential land uses. However, these environmental impacts are being addressed through land restoration frameworks that do not include the robust narrative on the links between land and Indigenous peoples. This link between land and Indigenous peoples is not visible in restoration frameworks owing to the linearity of these frameworks and their deep roots in Western science...

For over 50 years, the people of the Amskapi Piikani (Blackfeet) Nation have relayed information of "something bad" being covertly dumped within their remaining homelands. These stories, addressing contaminated waste and the locations of rumored dump sites, have also been linked with perceived cancer clusters among residents who live within the Blackfeet Nation. The concept of environmental injustice suggests that often the most vulnerable populations, including communities of color, experience the most negative realities of environmental toxic exposures, and it is not uncommon for toxic wastes to be disposed of within Native American lands...

Environmental justice is a prominent issue for Native American nations within the United States. One example is the abandoned uranium mines on the Navajo Nation that have been left unremediated since the Cold War. Often, environmental policy is developed for issues facing Native American nations that do not include input from those nations. Instead, Native American nations should have the opportunity to address environmental issues using their traditional ecological knowledge (TEK). TEK has ties to natural laws long respected by tribal communities; these laws provide the foundation for addressing the complex relationship between nature and humans...

Kanaka Maoli (Indigenous Hawaiians) are blessed with a written literature that documents observations and relationships with their environment in the form of chants, stories, and genealogies passed down orally for centuries. These literatures connect them to their ancestral knowledge and highlight species, places, and processes of importance. Such sayings as Pua ka wiliwili, nanahu ka manō (When the wiliwili blossoms, sharks bite), from the Kumulipo (a Kanaka Maoli creation story), are examples of the place of nature, humans, and a specifijic creature-here the shark, or manō -in ecological phenology...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Bayesian methods have been adopted by anthropologists for their utility in resolving complex questions about human history based on genetic data. The main advantages of Bayesian methods include simple model comparison, presenting results as a summary of probability distributions, and the explicit inclusion of prior information into analyses. In the field of anthropological genetics, for example, implementing Bayesian skyline plots and approximate Bayesian computation is becoming ubiquitous as means to analyze genetic data for the purpose of demographic or historic inference...

The Fujian Tanka people are officially classified as a southern Han ethnic group, whereas they have customs similar to Daic and Austronesion people. Whether they originated in Han or Daic people, there is no consensus. Three hypotheses have been proposed to explain the origin of this group: (1) the Han Chinese origin, (2) the ancient Daic origin, (3) and the admixture between Daic and Han. This study addressed this issue by analyzing the paternal Y chromosome and maternal mtDNA variation of 62 Fujian Tanka and 25 neighboring Han in Fujian...

Tacuarembó is a department located in northeastern Uruguay, whose population is the result of several migration waves from Europe and Near East, as well as Africans and Afro-descents mostly from Brazil; these waves settled with the territory's various Native ethnic groups (Charrúa, Minuán, and Guaraní). In the past, this population has been the focus of genetic studies showing this trihybrid origin, with greater contributions of Natives and Africans than in other Uruguayan regions. In this study we analyzed eight Alu insertions (A25, ACE, APOA1, B65, D1, F13B, PV92, TPA25) to provide valuable information for ancestrality and genetic differentiation and to compare with both previous studies on the Tacuarembó population and Alu frequencies in other Uruguayan populations...

Genetic studies on pre-Hispanic populations of the Southern Andes have been increasing steadily in the last decade. Nevertheless, ancient DNA characterization of Formative Period archaeological human remains is particularly scant, especially for Northwest Argentina. To expand current information on genetic characterization of the first agricultural communities of the southern Calchaquí Valleys, we present and discuss the first mitochondrial ancient DNA information obtained on samples dated to ca. 3,600-1,900 years before present from the Cajón Valley, Catamarca Province...

The mitochondrial haplotype U5a1 was identified from an Eneolithic grave associated with the Afanasievo archaeological culture in Bayankhongor Province, Erdenetsogt Township, at the site of Shatar Chuluu. This is the earliest appearance of an mtDNA haplotype associated with modern European populations on the Mongol Steppe. This evidence demonstrations that people with "western" mtDNA lived on the Mongol Steppe east of the Altai Mountains before the Bronze Age and refutes the notion that the Altai Mountains were a substantial barrier to gene flow, and definitively expands the acknowledged range of the Afanasievo archaeological culture...

Indigenous individuals and communities have experienced historic and ongoing negative interactions with Western health care and biomedical research. To rebuild trust and mitigate power structures between researchers and Indigenous peoples, researchers can adopt Indigenous epistemologies in methodologies, such as nonhierarchical approaches to relationship. This article shares models developed to bridge Indigenous epistemologies with Western qualitative and quantitative research methods and demonstrates how these epistemologies can be used to guide the authors' development of a pilot study on traumatic spinal cord injury...

American Indian health disparities have reached crisis levels, and there is a need to develop culturally congruent interventions through meaningful tribal involvement and ethical community-oriented approaches. Hence, it is imperative that researchers and university administrators better understand how research translation occurs for tribally driven health-equity research projects. Utilizing thematic analysis methods, the authors examined documents from a 12-year community-based participatory research partnership to elucidate factors that ignite momentum and support partnership longevity...

To date, some genetic studies offer medical benefits but lack a clear pathway to benefit for people from underrepresented backgrounds. Historically, Indigenous people, including the Diné (Navajo people), have raised concerns about the lack of benefits, misuse of DNA samples, lack of consultation, and ignoring of cultural and traditional ways of knowing. Shortly after the Navajo Nation Human Research Review Board was established in 1996, the Navajo Nation recognized growing concerns about genetic research, and in 2002 they established a moratorium on human genetic research studies...

Multiple terms describe Indigenous peoples' creative expressions, including "Indigenous knowledge" (IK), "traditional ecological knowledge" (TEK), "traditional knowledge" (TK), and increasingly, "Indigenous data" (ID). Variation in terms contributes to disciplinary divides, challenges in organizing and finding prior studies about Indigenous peoples' creative expressions, and intellectually divergent chains of reference. The authors applied a decolonial, digital, feminist, ethics-of-care approach to citation analysis of records about Indigenous peoples knowledge and data, including network analyses of author-generated keywords and research areas, and content analysis of peer-reviewed studies about ID...