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From:
Subject: Re: [DNA] biogeography, zoogeography, anthrogeography
Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2005 22:21:47 EDT


In a message dated 07/17/05 5:55:51 AM Pacific Daylight Time,
writes:

> To me, the tandem phrases you mention are redundant. Biogeography *is* the
> study of the geographic origins of animals, that is their geographic
> history.

I see I was too vague/imprecise in conveying my mindset on my original post,
where I wrote "I notice they [authors of the article mentioning Marligen] use
the 'biogeographic' word, so it's taking hold. I have the impression that
DNAPrint coined that word, but it would take some serious Googling to track that
down."

I was harking back to a post by David Faux, who raised the issue of whether
DNAH's use of the word biogeographic for a Y-SNP test would be confusing to
people who are used to seeing that word in the DNAPrint context of an autosomal
test called "Biogeographical Ancestry." It's really the phrase that I wanted to
track down.

So far, I haven't found anything earlier than 2000 (Scirus & Google Scholar
with date limitations). It was in a paper by Shriver's group at Penn State
University. Shriver is affiliated with DNAPrint, so that's possibly the origin of
the phrase. ("Biogeographic origins," on the other hand, seems to be an older
and broader phrase.)

So the question still remains -- should we try to reserve the phrase for
autosomal tests? We already have an example of using a word ("haplotype" for Y-STR
results) in a more restricted fashion than the wider world does. The Marligen
abstract and DNAH are using the word biogeographic for what we would call
haplogroups. The Genographic Project is also placing more emphasis on the
geographic aspects of DNA tests. Biogeographic is actually more descriptive and
user-friendly than haplogroups, so I would propose that we need to start qualifying
what kind of biogeographic test when we talk about it, and not assume that it
always refers to the DNAPrint approach.

Ann Turner

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