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A set of seven common Y-chromosome specific microsatellites has been used in the present report to type 308 individuals of 16 African population groups from Mozambique. These microsatellites include the DYS19, DYS390, DYS391, DYS392, DYS393, DYS389I and DYS389II systems. The population structure was analysed and therefore genetic distances and several diversity indices were computed and compared with other populations around the world. The results obtained in the present study show that these populations share common characteristics with other available Bantu-speaking African population groups and clear differences with non-African ones. The combination of the analysis of Y-chromosome STRs with other more slowly mutating Y-chromosome polymorphisms (biallelic markers), mtDNA sequences and autosomal data for the same populations, will allow the analysis of human evolution in paternal lineages in different time scales. The forensic implications of these results are discussed. D 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

The first hypervariable region and several restriction fragment polymorphisms in mitochondrial DNA were investigated in 308 individuals belonging to 16 different populations from Southeast Africa, all of them Bantu speaking (see Fig. 1). A total of 30 available African populations (or populations with an important African influence) as well as other non-African ones were used for comparison. Preliminary results are shown in the present work. High diversity values were found for the samples analysed in this work, in comparison with other African samples. Nucleotide mismatch distributions are rugged and multimodal, which could reflect the scenario of stationary populations rather than one of expansion. Phylogenetic reconstruction allowed us to infer that the Southeast African populations are distant from other population groups, with the ancient ones (Pygmies and !Kung) more closely related. The results obtained are of special forensic interest because they produced new mtDNA patterns from human populations completely unknown (from a genetic point of view) until now, and to increment our mtDNA databases for forensic purposes. 2. Nucleotide and sequence diversity Sequence diversity and nucleotide diversity were computed for all the populations analysed and compared with other African ones. Almost all the populations analysed here showed similar values for these indices, the lowest values were in the Makonde population (p=0.0187 and d=6.830) and the highest in the Shona (p=0.0277 and d=10.177), and they were, on average, slightly higher than those found for other African populations. When