The identification of a strong decay in LD between CD209 and CD209L facilitated the interpretation of neutrality tests, because the noise introduced by hitchhiking effects between the genes is reduced. We applied Tajima's D and Fay and Wu's H tests to determine whether these statistics significantly deviated from expectations under neutrality, using both coalescent simulations and the empirical distribution obtained from Akey et al. (2004). Globally, Tajima's D test indicated different tendencies for the two genes (table 2). CD209 always yielded negative values for Tajima's D but never achieved significance to reject the hypothesis of neutrality, whereas CD209L yielded significantly positive values for non-African populations, with use of both coalescent simulations and the empirical distribution. For Fay and Wu's H test, the hypothesis of neutrality was rejected for CD209 in the African and East Asian samples (table 2).