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...an ethnic group and its blood ties with other groups should be synthetically studied from the point of view of archeology, history, anthropology, linguistics, genetics, and other sciences.
The Tibetan ethnic group is one of the largest ethnic groups in China. The Tibetans number more than 1 million. Tibetan is a general term for people who live in the Himalayan Mountains and speak languages under the Tibetan branch of the Tibeto-Burman subfamily of the Sino-Tibetan family (Matisoff 1991). Tibetans are an important ethnic group in China and have their own customs and habits, costume and ornaments, beliefs, religion, and language.
Ancient Chinese archeological findings have been increasing gradually but are still fragmentary and have many missing links. Previous research is not complete or may be incorrect. Many ethnic groups had no written language in the past, and thus there are no written records about the prehistoric activities of human beings. Many anthropological characteristics (such as skin color and status) are strongly influenced by environmental factors. Populations with different origins evolved in the same direction under similar environments. The characteristics of cultural anthropology, such as customs and habits, costume and ornaments, beliefs and religion, as well as language, can easily change rapidly through conquests, living together, or contact with neighboring ethnic groups (Du and Xiao 1997).
People who speak Central and Northern Tibetan are mainly distributed in China (Tibet, Sichuan, and Yunnan), whereas Southern Tibetan speakers live in the southern Himalayan region, for example, in India, Bhutan, and Nepal. The Lhasa Tibetan group and the Kangba Tibetans belong to the Northern Tibetan speaking population. They have similar customs and habits, costume and ornaments, beliefs, religion, and language, but the original relation between the two Tibetan populations is still unclear.
The greatest advantage of genetics markers is their stability, although the nucleotides in genetic material (DNA) change at a defined rate and a small part of the mutations are under the selection of environment, with most of them being neutral, but the DNA is transmitted from generation to generation reliably. Therefore the genetic study of the origin and development of ethnic groups as well as the kinship between them has special significance.
Tibetan populations are distinctive, representative, and forensically relevant population groups in China; therefore our aims in this study were to report and examine allele and genotype frequencies for 15 STR loci in two Tibetan population samples and to determine whether the genotype frequencies conform to Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium. In addition, we calculated forensically relevant parameters to ascertain the utility of the 15 STR loci as genetic markers for the Tibetan population in Chinese forensic casework.
Materials and Methods
Population Sample. Whole blood was obtained by venipuncture into vacutainer tubes containing EDTA. One of the two Tibetan study populations consisted of a Tibetan group in Lhasa and a healthy unrelated Chinese Tibetan population living in Lhasa City in the Tibet region (China). The number of chromosomes analyzed was 126. The other Tibetan group was the Kangba Tibetan population, who live...
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