Mol Biol Evol (2011) doi: 10.1093/molbev/msr067 Genetic
structure of pastoral and farmer populations in the African
Sahel Viktor Černý et al. Traditional pastoralists survive in
but few places in the world. They can still be encountered in
the African Sahel, where annual alternations of dry and wet
seasons force them to continual mobility. Little is known about
the genetic structure of these populations. We present here the
population distribution of 312 HVS-I mtDNA and 364 Y-STR
haplotypes in both farmer and pastoralist groups from the Lake
Chad Basin and the West African Sahel. We show that the majority
of pastoral populations (represented in the African Sahel by the
Fulani nomads) fail to show significant departure from
neutrality for mtDNA as evidenced by Fu's Fs statistics, and
exhibit lower levels of intra-population diversity measures for
mtDNA when contrasted with farmers. These differences were not
observed for the Y chromosome. Furthermore, AMOVA analyses and
population distributions of the mtDNA ha