The genetic structure of a tribal population, the Yanomama Indians. X. Agreement between representations of village distances based on different sets of characteristics

Mahalanobis's D² statistic has been adapted to a complex of 9 dermatoglyphic traits studied in 7 Yanomama villages, and the matrix of 21 possible distances between these villages derived. Matrices based on gene frequencies at 9 loci and 12 anthropometric measurements are already available for these same 7 villages from previous publications. The similarity between these 3 matrices has been examined in 4 different ways. The matrices were subjected to the monotone distance analysis (MDA) of Guttman and Lingoes, and the goodness of fit of any 2 MDAs was tested by tau and the Lingoes Schonemann technique. The agreement between the gene frequency and the anthropometric distances is significant at or well beyond the 5% level by all approaches; the agreement of these with the dermatoglyphic distances is less often significant. The approximate geographic location of each of the 7 villages has been established and the resulting matrix of geographic distances and its derivations contrasted with the biological matrices by the above enumerated techniques. In general the correspondence is as good or better than the correspondence of the biological matrices with each other, the dermatoglyphic data showing a lesser correspondence. The numbers of observations per Yanomama village tend to be small, and the data sets are only partially overlapping; furthermore the villages studied are not uniformly dispersed throughout the tribal distribution. A better test of the correspondence of matrices derived in this fashion requires substantially larger samples from more uniformly dispersed villages, with the same individuals participating in each sample. It is suggested that the tendency of Yanomama villages to progressive fissionings and the recent centrifugal expansion of the tribe may result in unusually large and structured intervillage distances, factors which may play a role in the degree of correspondence observed. Comparable data on other tribal groups will be of great interest.