Nature reports, “We studied 96 Yorubans (from Nigeria), believed to share common ancestry with northern Europeans about 100,000 years ago.” Those possessing some combination of full facial features and wooly or wiry hair are here identified as African and those the Edo king of Nigeria [1], Nigerian hunter [2], and the Nunivak Alaskan hunter are all African. From North Europe and Eurasia arose the populations that passed from Siberia to Alaska (see map). The Nunivak “African” may be of the peoples sharing the above ancient ancestry with Nigerians. While the genetic link has been shown as written of below, the cultural anthroplogical evidence may give an echo of a substantive relationship in the similarities of the headdress between the Nigerians and Nunivak. [A] All wear the head band. [B] The representive bird is worn by both the Nigerian hunter [2[ and Nunivak [3]; whereas [C] feathers and [D] mask protrustions are worn by both the Edo king [1] and Nunivak [3]. While it cannot be claimed that there is a relatikonship, it cannot be said that there is none. The subject warrants further study. David Reich et. al., Linkage disequilibrium in the human genome, Nature 411, 199 – 204, issue of 10 May 2001; Whitehead Institute / MIT Center for Genome Research, Nine Cambridge Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142, USA We studied 96 Yorubans (from Nigeria), believed to share common ancestry with northern Europeans about 100,000 years ago. At short distances, the Nigerian and European-derived populations typically show the same allelic combinations (Fig. 4): D' has the same sign and a similar magnitude, indicating a common LD-generating event tracing far back in human history. However, the half-length of LD seems to extend less than 5 kb (Fig. 4) in the Yorubans. Markedly shorter range LD in sub-Saharan Africa has also been observed in several studies of single regions19, 20 (although two other studies did not show a clear trend21, 22). Our results indicate that the pattern of shorter LD in sub-Saharan African populations may be general. Notably, LD in the Nigerians is largely a subset of what is seen in the northern Europeans. The Yoruban haplotypes are generally contained within the longer Utah haplotypes, and there is little Yoruban-specific LD (85% of observations of substantial LD (|D'| > 0.5) in Yorubans are also substantial and of the same sign in Utah). The vast difference in the extent of LD between populations points to differences owing to population history, probably a bottleneck or founder effect that occurred among the ancestors of north Europeans after the divergence from the ancestors of the Nigerians. The short extent of LD in Nigerians is more consistent with the predictions of a computer simulation study assuming a simple model of population expansion...art, art history, Paul Marc Washington, paleoneolithic@yahoo.com

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