Impact of cultural and genetic structure on food choices along the Silk Road

Abstract

Among the universal cultural variables shared by human groups (e.g., language, traditional tales, beliefs), dietary habits play a key role at the individual level, such that “you are what you eat,” directly affecting one’s health and viability. In this work, we explored food preferences for 79 different foods within six populations along the historical Silk Road route. By using a probabilistic clustering technique, we summarized the cultural variables to cluster memberships and analyzed them in the light of sex, age, and genetic information from the same individuals. In doing so, we highlighted different facets of cultural admixture and stratification, reflecting religious dietary restrictions, age-related personal preferences, and pastoralist traditions, which in some cases genetics alone failed to identify.