Interesting, but the article didn’t seem to give a definition for Asian. Do the genetics match the geographic dividing line (the Ural Mountains, Caucasus Mountains, Turkish straits and Sinai) or does the European bloodline include the Mid East and India with the Asian one in Eastern Asia? Similarly, did the African grouping include just south of the Sahara or did they try to group those north into it?
But it does refer to "popular notions of race," which would seem to indicate that "Asian" corresponds to dark hair and the presence of the epicanthic fold about the eyes.
None of this is particularly surprising, of course, though I suppose it does sorta pop the bubble of those who suggest that there is no genetic basis for the idea of race.
That position is, of course, primarily an ideological one.
LOL, my favorite line!!
It’s probably in the original paper, which I hope someone will excerpt, post, or make available (PDF, .doc, HTML, whatever) for download.
"Seldin and his group set out to discover which SNPs among Europeans could account for shared common ancestry. "We saw a clustering of individuals that come from either southern Europe or derived from populations that left southern Europe, or the Mediterranean, in the last 2,000 years," Seldin said. This allowed the group to identify a set of 400 informative SNP markers that scientists could now use to control for European ancestry when conducting genetic studies of disease, response to drug treatment, or side effects from therapy."
"In addition to future medical applications, the data are also of interest to anthropologists who study historical human migrations. The Southern grouping included individuals from Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain, as well as Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews. The Northern group included people with English, Irish, German, Swedish and Ukranian ancestry. These groups correspond to those historically divided by the Pyrenees and Alps mountain ranges."
"With respect to population genetics, previous studies have shown that SNPs correlate broadly with continental ancestry, dividing modern humans into four large groups: Asia, Africa, Oceana, America and continental Europe. The new study gives scientists the evidence they need to further subdivide people with European ancestry into the Northern and Southern groups when looking for SNPs that may be involved in disease."