Ethnic Identifiers are Not Necessarily Excellent Population Identifiers: A Commentary from the Turkana in North-Western Kenya

Abstract

Ethnic identifiers have mostly been used as population references in human research. The ability of humans to learn or ape such ethnic identifiers (i.e. language, culture and subsistence activities) makes their status as true identifiers debatable. Equally, the heterogeneity (genetic, cultural, linguistic and even economically) of most human populations implies the likely erroneous conclusions that can be made whenever ethnic identifiers are taken as population identifiers. We hypothesise that the sampling location, GPS position might be better identifiers leaving room for accounting for the occurrence of possible differences especially when samples are obtained from similar population(s) but from different site(s) given the varied nurturing ability from the possibly disparate environmental conditions.