Genetics Genetics Genetics It's something we can't ignore when talking about issues of racial origin. One such genetic marker is dry ear wax. The marker is called rs17822931 and is responsible for dry earwax and lack of body odor. In fact a chart of its distribution correlates one to one with the distribution of the Mongoloid races(Yellow part in chart below).
What's interesting is the highest concentration of rs17822931 is not in China nor North Central Asia, but instead a concentration of almost 100% is in, drum roll please, Korea.
Now, migration is complicated thing going in many directions at the same time - for example, wet rice culture clearly shows migration from SEA radiating throughout all of Asia and there is also the Jomon migration to Japan. However, genetic markers do not develop independently and I think this chart clearly shows that at least in some way, a genetic migration started in Korea and radiated out to every Mongoloid location.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gn...nd-adaptation/
.... Over the past five years the genetics of earwax has come back into the spotlight, because of its variation and what it can tell us about the history and evolution of humans since the Out of Africa event. Not only that, it seems the variation in earwax has some other phenotypic correlates. The SNPs in and around ABCC11 are a set where East Asians in particular show signs of being different from other world populations. The variants which are nearly fixed in East Asia around this locus are nearly disjoint in frequency with those in Africa. Here are the frequencies of the alleles of rs17822931 on ABCC11 from ALFRED:
The expression of the dry earwax phenotype is contingent on an AA genotype, it has recessive expression. So in a population where the allele frequency of A ~0.50, the dry earwax phenotype would have a ~0.25 frequency. In a population where the A allele has a ~0.20 frequency, the dry earwax phenotype would be at ~0.04 frequency. Among people of European descent the dry earwax phenotype is present at proportions of less than ~5%. Because of recessive expression a larger minority of Japanese and Chinese should manifest wet earwax, though interestingly the ALFRED database indicates that Koreans are fixed for the A allele. In Africa conversely the G allele seems to be fixed....