Greek HLAs

[Polako]

Hello,

I've just revisited this report on the net...

www.makedonika.org/processpaid.aspcontentid=ti.2001.pdf

I remember seeing some good arguments against it posted by Greeks online, but I can't find them now.

Does anyone have links explaining why this report may not be entirely accurate?

[Katea]

HLA markers are worse than useless for making phylogenetic inferences. The more a genetic marker is affected by selection, the less reliable it is.

I do believe the good argument you recall is from Dienekes' web site:
www.geocities.com/dienekesp/kemp.html

The use of HLA markers for constructing phylogenies was criticised by leading geneticists, Neil Risch from Stanford U., Alberto Piazza from the University of Torino and L. L. Cavalli-Sforza also from Stanford
Their comments (admittedly not specifically directed towards the Greek paper,..but the criticism still equally stands since virtually the same data set was used for the paper for which the criticism was directed)

"Even a cursory look at the paper's diagrams and trees immediately indicates that the authors make some extraordinary claims. They used a single genetic marker, HLA DRB1, for their analysis to construct a genealogical tree and map of 28 populations from Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Japan. Using results from the analysis of a single marker, particularly one likely to have undergone selection, for the purpose of reconstructing genealogies is unreliable and unacceptable practice in population genetics.
The limitations are made evident by the authors' extraordinary observations that Greeks are very similar to Ethiopians and east Africans but very distant from other south Europeans; and that the Japanese are nearly identical to west and south Africans. It is surprising that the authors were not puzzled by these anomalous results, which contradict history, geography, anthropology and all prior population-genetic studies of these groups."