An Aboriginal Australian Genome Reveals Separate Human Dispersals into Asia

Xiaosen Xiao , Yong Wang (1) , Kirk E. Lohmueller (2) , Rasmus Rasmussen , Anders Albrechtsen (3) , Line Li , Stinus Li , Mait Metspalu (4) , Thibaut Jombart (5) , Toomas Kivisild (6) , Weiwei Zhai , Anders Eriksson (7) , Andrea Manica , Ludovic Orlando (8) , Francisco de La Vega , Silvana Tridico , Ene Metspalu (4) , Kasper Nielsen , María Ávila-Arcos , J. Víctor Moreno-Mayar , Craig Muller , Joe Dortch , Thomas Gilbert , Ole Lund (9) , Agata Wesolowska , Monika Karmin , Lucy Anne Weinert (10) , Biao Wang , Jun Li , Shuaishuai Tai , Fei Xiao (11) , Tsunehiko Hanihara , George van Driem , Aashish Jha , François-Xavier Ricaut (12) , Peter de Knijff (13) , Andrea Migliano , Irene Gallego Romero , Karsten Kristiansen (14) , David Lambert , Søren Brunak (15) , Peter Forster , Bernd Brinkmann , Olaf Nehlich , Michael Bunce , Richard Richards , Ramneek Gupta , Carlos D. Bustamante (2) , Anders Krogh , Robert Foley , Marta Lahr (6) , François Balloux (16) , Richard Villems (17) , Rasmus Nielsen (18) , Jun Wang (19) , Eske Willerslev (8) , M. Rasmussen , X. Guo (20) , S. Rasmussen , L. Skotte , S. Lindgreen , M. de La Vega , M. Avila-Arcos , M. Gilbert , A. Weinert , X. Ricaut , M. Lambert (21) , M. Richards , A. Foley , Thomas Sicheritz-Ponten (9)

1 NJUST - Nanjing University of Science and Technology
2 Department of Biological Statistics and Computational Biology
3 Section of Biostatistics [Copenhagen]
4 University of Tartu
5 MRC - Medical Research Council, Centre for Outbreak Analysis and Modelling
6 Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies University of Cambridge
7 IRF - Swedish Institute of Space Physics [Uppsala / Kiruna]
8 Section for GeoGenetics
9 Center for Biological Sequence Analysis
10 CAM - University of Cambridge [UK]
11 Interaction virus-hôte et maladies du foie
12 CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
13 Center for Human and Clinical Genetics
14 Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
15 DTU - Danmarks Tekniske Universitet = Technical University of Denmark
16 Edin. - University of Edinburgh
17 UAABC - Anthropologie Bio-Culturelle
18 Dept Integrat Biol
19 CCCME - Chinese Academy of Agricultural Mechanization Sciences
20 3SR - Laboratoire sols, solides, structures - risques [Grenoble]
21 Service de Médecine interne A et polyclinique médicale [CHU Limoges]

We present an Aboriginal Australian genomic sequence obtained from a 100-year-old lock of hair donated by an Aboriginal man from southern Western Australia in the early 20th century. We detect no evidence of European admixture and estimate contamination levels to be below 0.5%. We show that Aboriginal Australians are descendants of an early human dispersal into eastern Asia, possibly 62,000 to 75,000 years ago. This dispersal is separate from the one that gave rise to modern Asians 25,000 to 38,000 years ago. We also find evidence of gene flow between populations of the two dispersal waves prior to the divergence of Native Americans from modern Asian ancestors. Our findings support the hypothesis that present-day Aboriginal Australians descend from the earliest humans to occupy Australia, likely representing one of the oldest continuous populations outside Africa.

Domaines: Anthropologie biologique

Xiaosen Xiao, Yong Wang, Kirk E. Lohmueller, Rasmus Rasmussen, Anders Albrechtsen, et al.. An Aboriginal Australian Genome Reveals Separate Human Dispersals into Asia. Science, 2011, 334 (6052), pp.94-98. ⟨10.1126/science.1211177⟩. ⟨hal-02112809⟩