Abstract
Completion of a survey of dermatoglyphic variables for all ethnic groups in an ethnically diverse country like China is a huge research project, and an achievement that anthropological and dermatoglyphic scholars in the country could once only dream of. However, through the endeavors of scientists in China over the last 30 years, the dream has become reality. This paper reports the results of a comprehensive analysis of dermatoglyphics from all ethnic groups in China. Using cluster analysis and principal component analysis of dermatoglyphics, it has been found that Chinese populations can be generally divided into a southern group and a northern group. Furthermore, there has been considerable debate about the origins of many Chinese populations and about proper assignment of these peoples to larger ethnic groups. In this paper, we suggest that dermatoglyphic data can inform these debates by helping to classify a Chinese population as a northern or southern group, using selected reference populations and quantitative methods. This study is the first to assemble and investigate dermatoglyphics from all 56 Chinese ethnic groups. It is fortunate that data on population dermatoglyphics, a field of physical anthropology, have now been collected for all 56 Chinese ethnic groups, because intermarriage between individuals from different Chinese ethnic groups occurs more frequently in recent times, making population dermatoglyphic research an ever more challenging field of inquiry.
Highlights
Each person’s set of fingerprints is different, but fingerprints for an individual remain stable over a lifetime
Population dermatoglyphics is a field of research within physical anthropology
Dermatoglyphic characteristics can divide Chinese populations into a southern group and a northern group, taking the Yangtze River or 300–330 latitude as the boundary. This conjecture is similar to the results of dermatoglyphic research conducted in 1998 [6]
Summary
Each person’s set of fingerprints is different, but fingerprints for an individual remain stable over a lifetime. These characteristics have made fingerprints very useful as tools for law enforcement officials in many criminal cases. Fingerprints vary considerably among different groups of people, and can be useful as tools for tracing individuals to particular populations. Population dermatoglyphics is a field of research within physical anthropology It focuses on the dermatoglyphics of different ethnic groups [1,2,3,4]. A small number of research projects on dermatoglyphics were carried out in Mainland China before 1964, and large-scale investigation and research on dermatoglyphics did not begin until 1977 [6,7,8,9,10]. Over the past 30 years, through the endeavors of many dermatoglyphic researchers in China, we have jointly completed a grand research project on the dermatoglyphics of the Chinese people [6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27]
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