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Mol Biol Evol. 2008 Mar 21 [Epub ahead of print]
Climate Change and Post-Glacial Human Dispersals in Southeast Asia.
Soares P, Trejaut JA, Loo JH, Hill C, Mormina M, Lee CL, Chen YM,
Hudjashov G, Forster P, Macaulay V, Bulbeck D, Oppenheimer S, Lin M,
Richards MB.
Modern humans have been living in Island Southeast Asia (ISEA) for
at least 50,000 years. Largely because of the influence of linguistic
studies, however, which have a shallow time depth, the attention of
archaeologists and geneticists has usually been focused on the last
6000 years - in particular, on a proposed Neolithic dispersal from
China and Taiwan. Here we use complete mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA)
genome sequencing to spotlight some earlier processes that clearly had
a major role in the demographic history of the region but have
hitherto been unrecognised. We show that haplogroup E, an important
component of mtDNA diversity in the region, evolved in situ over the
last 35,000 years and expanded dramatically throughout ISEA around the
beginning of the Holocene, at the time when the ancient continent of
Sundaland was being broken up into the present-day archipelago by
rising sea levels. It reached Taiwan and Near Oceania more recently,
within the last approximately 8000 years. This suggests that global
warming and sea-level rises at the end of the Ice Age, 15,000-7000
years ago, were the main forces shaping modern human diversity in the
region. |
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