Carriers of mitochondrial DNA macrohaplogroup R colonized Eurasia and Australasia from a southeast Asia core area

BMC Evolutionary Biology

Research Article

Jose M Larruga¹  Vicente M Cabrera¹  Khaled K Abu-Amero²  Patricia Marrero³  Maria V Golubenko⁴ 

[1] Departamento de Genética, Facultad de Biología, Universidad de La Laguna, E-38271 La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain;Glaucoma Research Chair, Department of Ophthalmology, College of Medicine, King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia;Research Support General Service, Universidad de La Laguna, E-38271 La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain;The Research Institute for Medical Genetics, 634050, Tomsk, Russia;

关键词: Human evolution;    Mitochondrial DNA;    Macrohaplogroup R;    Haplogroup U;    Out-of-Africa;   

DOI  :  10.1186/s12862-017-0964-5

 received in 2017-01-29, accepted in 2017-05-11,  发布年份 2017

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundThe colonization of Eurasia and Australasia by African modern humans has been explained, nearly unanimously, as the result of a quick southern coastal dispersal route through the Arabian Peninsula, the Indian subcontinent, and the Indochinese Peninsula, to reach Australia around 50 kya. The phylogeny and phylogeography of the major mitochondrial DNA Eurasian haplogroups M and N have played the main role in giving molecular genetics support to that scenario. However, using the same molecular tools, a northern route across central Asia has been invoked as an alternative that is more conciliatory with the fossil record of East Asia. Here, we assess as the Eurasian macrohaplogroup R fits in the northern path.ResultsHaplogroup U, with a founder age around 50 kya, is one of the oldest clades of macrohaplogroup R in western Asia. The main branches of U expanded in successive waves across West, Central and South Asia before the Last Glacial Maximum. All these dispersions had rather overlapping ranges. Some of them, as those of U6 and U3, reached North Africa. At the other end of Asia, in Wallacea, another branch of macrohaplogroup R, haplogroup P, also independently expanded in the area around 52 kya, in this case as isolated bursts geographically well structured, with autochthonous branches in Australia, New Guinea, and the Philippines.ConclusionsCoeval independently dispersals around 50 kya of the West Asia haplogroup U and the Wallacea haplogroup P, points to a halfway core area in southeast Asia as the most probable centre of expansion of macrohaplogroup R, what fits in the phylogeographic pattern of its ancestor, macrohaplogroup N, for which a northern route and a southeast Asian origin has been already proposed.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© The Author(s). 2017