What is the origin of people whose little toe nails are divided into two petals?

You must have had such an experience. You accidentally hooked your little toe's nail when you were wearing socks, or bumped into it when you were not wearing shoes at home, and found that only your little toe's nail split in half. This phenomenon exists in most people in China, and it is not a case. It's called pián zhǐ, which is also called petal nail in medicine. Strictly speaking, petaloid nail has been classified as a manifestation of slight toe deformity, but it is painless and harmless, so it has not been paid attention to. But it is these humble genetic markers that can trace the course of ethnic integration and the migration direction of ancestors in history and find out where you come from.

The petal-shaped armor was once considered as a symbol of pure Han Chinese, but this statement was quickly broken because there was no such thing as "pure Han Chinese". During the Five Chaos Period, the Han nationality suffered the worst disaster, and the population once dropped to only a few hundred thousand. In history, the Han and Mongolian people also had gene exchanges, and both the Hexi Corridor and the Silk Road experienced ethnic integration, and it was the integration of the two tribes from the Emperor Yanhuang. Now the Han nationality has long been a multi-lineage fusion. The petaloid nail has nothing to do with bloodline, and it is said on the Internet that it is descended from Xianbei or Xiongnu. There is no scientific basis, and some rumors are even born in novels. There is a widely circulated theory about the origin of petal-shaped armor. More than 600 years ago, in the early days of the founding of the Ming Dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang ordered immigrants from Shanxi to various places. Many people are reluctant to leave because of nostalgia. Three days later, the government asked them to gather under the big pagoda tree in Hongtong County, Shanxi Province. These people were surrounded by soldiers, cut their little toes' nails and forcibly taken away for migration. The mark left on the toes is to prevent people from escaping. It can be found from the mark, and it is also convenient for them to find their relatives and recognize their ancestors. As a result, petal-shaped nails have been handed down, but this statement has great problems. Genetic traits are usually genetic mutations in individuals, and then the mutated genes cause individual differences, and the dominant individuals in the environment are preserved, eventually forming a stable inheritance. 600 years is obviously too short, and man-made trauma is not hereditary. There is indeed a record of this migration in history, but there is no record of cutting toes with a knife.

There is a reasonable friction theory about the origin of petaloid nail: petaloid nail originated in ancient China at least 5,000 years ago. People's long-term farming and labor cracked the most fragile little toe and turned the original whole nail into two petals. For example, a big glass is easy to break, but when this big glass becomes many small glasses, each small glass is not easy to break. The appearance of petaloid nail was influenced by the environment, and the genetic changes after generation were also the result of adapting to the environment at that time.

According to the genetic map, petaloid nail is a single gene dominant inheritance on autosome. If your little toe is a petaloid nail, then at least one of your parents is a petaloid nail, which will gradually appear after 5 years old. Although the Shanxi knife cutting theory mentioned above is not reliable, anthropologists have found that the distribution of petaloid nails is closely related to Shanxi. Through the investigation in seven villages and provinces where there has been no large-scale population migration in the past hundred years, it is found that the petaloid beetle is the most widely distributed in Shanxi, and 79.438+0% of Shanxi people have this trait.

From Shanxi and Shaanxi to Henan, Zhejiang, Jiangsu, and then to Fujian and Jiangxi, the distribution of petaloid beetles began in Shanxi and gradually decreased outward, which was consistent with the migration situation in Shanxi in history. Therefore, the most reasonable explanation for petaloid nail at present is that the split of our little toe into two petals has nothing to do with bloodline, but is a genetic feature left by our ancestors' long-term farming. The people who inherited the characteristics mainly thrived in Shanxi and its nearby areas 600 years ago, and their descendants migrated to the north and south of the Yangtze River.