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HEREDITAS(Beijing) ›› 2013, Vol. 35 ›› Issue (6): 761-770.doi: 10.3724/SP.J.1005.2013.00761

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Contact and admixture—the relationship between Dongxiang population and their language viewed from Y chromosomes

WEN Shao-Qing1, XIE Xiao-Dong1,3, XU Dan2   

  1. 1. Institute of Medical Genetics, School of Basic Medical Sciences, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou 730000, China 2. Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales, Centre de Recherches de Linguistique d'Asie Orientale, Institut Universitaire de France, 65 rue des Grands Moulins, Paris 75013, France 3. Key Laboratory of Evidence Science of Gansu Province, Gansu Institute of Political Science and Law, Lanzhou 730070, China
  • Received:2012-10-25 Revised:2013-01-04 Online:2013-06-20 Published:2013-06-25

Abstract: Dongxiang is one of special ethnic groups of Gansu Province. Their language is one of the Mongolian languages of Altai language family. And their origin has long been controversial. The results of Cluster analyses (multidimensional scaling analysis, dendrograms, principal component analyses, and networks) of Dongxiang population and other ethnic groups indicated that Dongxiang people is much closer to the Central Asian ethnic groups than to the other Mongolian. Admixture analyses also confirmed the result. This suggests that Dongxiang people did not descend from Mongolian, but from the Central Asian ethnic groups that have spoken Persian or Turkic language. This mismatch between paternal genetic lineage and language classification might be explained by the elite-dominance model. The ancestral populations of Dongxiang could be the Central Asian ethnic groups assimilated by Mongolian in language and culture.

Key words: Y chromosome, molecular anthropology, Dongxiang, ethnic source, the elite-dominance model