ABSTRACT
By studying 908 males from 33 locations of Europe, North Africa and West Asia, the variation of two Y-linked dinucleotide microsatellites was analyzed within three major chromosomal frames defined by mutations that are in or approach the condition of non-recurrence. Among the 223 haplotypes found, we selected a set of the ten most common haplotypes, representing 47.6% of the entire sample. We observed that they detect most of the information on inter-population differences. We calculated partial regression coefficients for haplotype frequencies as a function of latitude and longitude of the sampling locations and showed that some of them are distributed according to a cline. Furthermore, the incidence of the selected haplotypes was heterogenous, denoting the extremely high structuring of populations. These results indicate that Y chromosomal types defined by these markers here described can be considered optimal for population studies also because reliable frequency estimates can be obtained in small samples.