Afghanistan's ethnic groups share a y-chromosomal heritage structured by historical events

Haber, Marc; Platt, Daniel E.; Ashrafian Bonab, Maziar; Youhanna, Sonia C.; Soria-Hernanz, David F.; Mart�nez-Cruz, Bego�a; Douaihy, Bouchra; Ghassibe-Sabbagh, Michella; Rafatpanah, Hoshang; Ghanbari, Mohsen; Whale, John; Balanovsky, Oleg; Wells, R. Spencer; Comas, David; Tyler-Smith, Chris; Zalloua, Pierre A.; The Genographic Consortium

Abstract

Afghanistan has held a strategic position throughout history. It has been inhabited since the Paleolithic and later became a crossroad for expanding civilizations and empires. Afghanistan's location, history, and diverse ethnic groups present a unique opportunity to explore how nations and ethnic groups emerged, and how major cultural evolutions and technological developments in human history have influenced modern population structures. In this study we have analyzed, for the first time, the four major ethnic groups in present-day Afghanistan: Hazara, Pashtun, Tajik, and Uzbek, using 52 binary markers and 19 short tandem repeats on the non-recombinant segment of the Y-chromosome. A total of 204 Afghan samples were investigated along with more than 8,500 samples from surrounding populations important to Afghanistan's history through migrations and conquests, including Iranians, Greeks, Indians, Middle Easterners, East Europeans, and East Asians. Our results suggest that all current Afghans largely share a heritage derived from a common unstructured ancestral population that could have emerged during the Neolithic revolution and the formation of the first farming communities. Our results also indicate that inter-Afghan differentiation started during the Bronze Age, probably driven by the formation of the first civilizations in the region. Later migrations and invasions into the region have been assimilated differentially among the ethnic groups, increasing inter-population genetic differences, and giving the Afghans a unique genetic diversity in Central Asia. © 2012 Haber et al.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Feb 25, 2012
• Online Publication Date: Mar 28, 2012
• Publication Date: Mar 28, 2012
• Deposit Date: Aug 13, 2019
• Publicly Available Date: Aug 22, 2019
• Journal: PLoS ONE
• Electronic ISSN: 1932-6203
• Publisher: Public Library of Science
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 7
• Issue: 3
• Pages: e34288
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0034288
• Keywords: General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology; General Agricultural and Biological Sciences; General Medicine
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/2044060
• Publisher URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0034288
• Contract Date: Aug 14, 2019