Clines

Penelope A. McLorg

Clines are gradations in biological features over geographic space. They refer to continuous degrees of difference in either phenotype or genotype across or within human populations. A given cline consists of the gradient in frequency of a single trait over space. This graded change is often associated with a gradually changing environmental factor. Thus, gradients in the appearance or function of a trait represented by a cline can correspond with graded alterations in the environment. Clines are useful to biological, medical, and other anthropologists interested in depicting and analyzing human variation. When a cline is graphically portrayed, portions of the distribution of the trait that have the same value are connected by a line. On either side of the line appear other lines representing progressively greater and lesser frequency of the trait. Thus, the graph of the cline resembles a weather map, with bands of varying temperature or pressure occurring ...

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