Abstract
Human populations are highly culturally diverse. What influence do these cultural variations have on human genetic diversity? To answer this question, I'll take the example of social organization. For example, the rule of filiation, which affiliates the child to a kinship group, differs from one population to another. In the West, it is often undifferentiated, meaning that the child is part of a kinship network made up of his or her paternal and maternal families. But this is not the most frequent rule: the majority of human populations have a unilineal filiation and are organized in groups called lineages and clans. Children are then affiliated either to their father's group (patrilineal descent), or to their mother's group (matrilineal descent). Members of the same group claim to be descendants of a common ancestor in the paternal or maternal line.
Our research in populations with matrilineal, patrilineal and undifferentiated parentage shows that kinship groups are based on links that are sometimes biological, sometimes symbolic. They also reveal the signatures left in genetic diversity by these matrilineal, patrilineal and undifferentiated systems. DNA thus bears the trace of these cultural variations, opening up the possibility of reconstructing the history of these social organizations over time. This research contributes to a growing body of evidence that the cultural diversity of human populations shapes their genetic diversity, generation after generation.
