Maju pointed me to a new paper on the genetics of Sudanese today. My interest was piqued, then not so much when I looked more closely. Genetic variation and population structure among Sudanese populations as indicated by the 15 Identifiler STR loci:
Background
There is substantial ethnic, cultural and linguistic diversity among the people living in east Africa, Sudan and the Nile Valley. The region around the Nile Valley has a long history of succession of different groups, coupled with demographic and migration events, potentially leading to genetic structure among humans in the region.Results
We report the genotypes of the 15 Identifiler microsatellite markers for 498 individuals from 18 Sudanese populations representing different ethnic and linguistic groups. The combined power of exclusion (PE) was 0.9999981, and the combined match probability was 1 in 7.4 1017. The genotype data from the Sudanese populations was combined with previously published genotype data from Egypt, Somalia and the Karamoja population from Uganda. The Somali population was found to be genetically distinct from the other northeast African populations. Individuals from northern Sudan clustered together with those from Egypt, and individuals from southern Sudan clustered with those from the Karamoja population. The similarity of the …