Worldwide Distribution of Blood Types

anthro.palomar.edu

12 points·crocus··4 comments

How do they identify who is a 'native'? And does it not seem a bit suspicious to anybody that the area where the 'A' blood type crops up in Africa is also the same area where slaves were picked up from and returned back during abolishment?

Also, if you overlay the O graph on top of the B type, you see some correlation with the language family (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b5/Languengl...) in Africa.

Unfortunately, the addition of european languages in South America spoils the correlation.

I bet it would be quite interesting to compare ethnic groups with language families and blood types.

For some reason I've always had the impression that O was rare. I cross checked with wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_type#ABO_and_Rh_distribut... and it seems a bit less than A (O+ and O- compared to A+, A-, AB+ and AB-), but no means rare. Did anybody else have this prejudice?

The 'native' part also seems a little dubious. What is that supposed to mean in terms of their samples?

Yup, I had exactly the same reaction (I was even just about to post the wikipedia url, before I read your post).

I may have been getting a few ideas mixed up though - certainly someone with O- is quite rare, but O+ is very common. And then there is the fact that if you are O-, you are guaranteed to have the lowest likelihood of finding a matching donor.

I always thought AB was the most common, but it appears to be less than 10% almost everywhere.

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