Anthropometric variation and population structure of the island of Pag, Croatia

Human Biology, Apr 1994 by Smolej-Narancic, N, Chaventre, A, Rudan, P

Analysis at the Regional Level. Discriminant analysis carried out at the regional level (western, eastern, and northern parts of the island) showed significant morphological discrimination among the three population groups (Table 4). Both discriminant functions are significant discriminators. The first accounts for 73-83% of the total discrimination and separates the eastern population group from the other two regional groups (see Figure 4 for the head variables and Figure 5 for the body variables). The second discriminant function separates the western from the northern population group. The results are identical in both sexes.

Table 5 presents the results of the analysis of variance carried out for the three regional population groups. The groups are heterogeneous for most of the studied traits, and the results are almost identical in both sexes. Regarding head dimensions, the eastern population group has the smallest head length relative to head width and the greatest forehead and interorbital widths and morphological face and nose heights. Regarding body dimensions, the western group has larger values of all significantly heterogeneous traits than the other two groups.

The degree of divergence at the regional level was compared with that at the village level using the minimum F sub ST, a summary measure of variation between subdivisions relative to the current total population. The minimum F sub ST was derived from all the head and body variables simultaneously (Table 6). In both sexes the minimum F sub ST value is 2.4 times lower at the regional level (males, 0.0096; females, 0.0086) than at the village level (males, 0.0237; females, 0.0201). In addition, all the minimum F sub ST estimates for the individual pairs of population groups are also lower than those for the nine villages, the values increasing from the west-north toward the east-north and the west-east pairs. Because the minimum FST is an estimator of the minimum degree of genetic divergence among subdivisions, the obtained results imply that regional population groups are not the smallest units of mating and that the divergence exists primarily at the village level.

Within-Region Analysis. Further minimum F sub ST values were derived within each region to find out the amount of among-village variation in the regions (Table 6). The minimum F sub ST values are the lowest for the eastern region, indicating that the village populations from the eastern part of the island are less differentiated than those from the western and northern parts.

Distance Matrix Correlations. The matrix of Mahalanobis distances (D sup 2) between the studied village populations derived for 38 anthropometric head and body variables is shown in Table 7. To analyze anthropometric-geographic-linguistic correspondences in the Pag population, we used the matrices of geographic and linguistic (H sub m) distances as predictors of the anthropometric distance matrix. The analysis was carried out for eight of the nine anthropometrically studied populations. Village 11 (Kustici) was not included because it had not been studied linguistically (Sujoldzic, 1990). Table 8 shows the results of the regression analysis using the Mantel matrix comparison technique. The partial correlation of geography and anthropometric distance is significant in both sexes (p