I am under the assumption that Southeast Asia is the Asian version of what Middle East is to a European. The people have somewhat similar phenotype, but actually different.
Do you think that the genetic distance between, say, Kurds and German is roughly the same as Korean (NE Asian) and Vietnamese (SE Asian)?
tagged.
As I understand it, it's not a totally straightforward question. So my attempt to answer may not be totally helpful answer.
The fst (fixation index) distance Kurdish-German and Korean-Vietnamese is roughly comparable at around 0.010 - 0.013. So at first blush, comparable, and if you wanted to go no further you could simply say comparable.
But at the same time if you use an f3 or IBS based genetic sharing method as "distance", there will I think be less sharing between Kurdish-German than Korean-Vietnamese. This is hard to separate from being a product of the serial genetic bottleneck out of Africa, but may reflect a reality that ancestors of Kurds and Germans were evolving separately in different populations for slightly longer time depth, without as much drift relative to time depth.
However, all this distance stuff is also slightly secondary to the question of how much the populations were meaningfully evolving in different environments, and so have measurably different selected characteristics. E.g. for a contrast there is probably a lot more deep structure in human populations in the Middle East than elsewhere in Eurasia... but somewhere like the Americans which humans only entered probably 16000 ybp has a lot of different environments that select for different characteristics, from the mountains of the Andes to the Amazon. And that will push people to be more different than populations evolving for the same time depth in a very similar or identical environment. So that is an even harder question to solve, and no genetic distance measure will actually tell you about that.
Vietnamese aren't best proxy for SE-Asian, there are too "south Chinese-like" compared to Cambodia for example.
#3 don't over think this with babble about Amazonians...
#4 thank you for that. I hadn't considered the similarities of Vietnam/China.
so the question remains, of the Caucasoid how far apart (on a DNA chart) are the North Europeans from the Near Easterners (west compared to east) vs. the extremes of the Mongoloid (north to south). does that frame this question better? I understand what the OP was asking, but I'd rather free the thread of trailing off about other groups...
#5 hey, continue to under-think things, as I'm sure you habitually do.
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote