The influence of cultural factors on the demography and pattern of gene flow from the Makiritare to the Yanomama Indians This work has been supported in part by grant AT(11-1)-1552 of the U. S. Atomic Energy Commission. Paper presented in part at the Twelfth International Congress of Genetics and the Eighth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, Tokyo, Japan, 1968.

Abstract

A single village of Yanomama Indians was found to have frequencies of Di a of 0.06 and of Ap a of 0.08, in contrast to 40 other villages where Di a was absent and Ap a quite rare. The source of these genes was identified as a village of Makiritare Indians, but the two allele frequencies were approximately the same or even higher in the Yanomama than in the Makiritare village. Demographic, social and cultural parameters affecting marriage and reproduction in the two tribes explain this. Genealogical relationships and informants' accounts collected in the field, when viewed against the traditional marriage practices, reproductive advantages of headmen, and differential treatment of captured women, indicate that the mating and reproduction parameters inherent in tribal social organization of this kind constitute an essential part of the explanation of the genetic findings. It is argued that mating systems of this sort are such that the probability of a new gene introduced by a captive surviving in the recipient population is a function of the sex of the initial carrier. The implications for tribalization and potentially radical changes in allele frequencies are briefly explored by considering aspects of settlement pattern and population fissioning known to characterize the tribes in question. Finally, it is shown that genetic sampling from a single location can and does result in unrepresentative allele frequencies when this single sample is taken to characterize the tribe as a whole.