Genetic Evidence and the Peopling of Asia

The DNA of Indigenous peoples is a hot topic these days for anthropologists, geneticists, and others interested in figuring out the migration patters of humans in prehistory. Often there are problems with how the DNA is obtained from indigenous peoples, what they are told it will be used for, acknowledgment that it will be stored and reused for multiple purposes, and that it may be used by researchers to either claim affiliation or lack of affiliation between certain indigenous groups and those groups identified in prehistory. I've written a fair amount about this, with a book on the topic discussing the peopling of North America in prehistory, a short article on the same topic, and then a short blurb as well.

Well, a recent study was published in the American Journal of Human Genetics that deals with this topic, although not from the perspective if North America. Rather, these researchers tried to figure out how Asia was originally colonized in the Pleistocene. Here is the abstract:

Phylogeographic Analysis of Mitochondrial DNA in Northern Asian Populations (81:1025-1041).

Miroslava Derenko, Boris Malyarchuk, Tomasz Grzybowski, Galina Denisova, Irina Dambueva, Maria Perkova, Choduraa Dorzhu, Faina Luzina, Hong Kyu Lee, Tomas Vanecek, Richard Villems, and Ilia Zakharov

To elucidate the human colonization process of northern Asia and human dispersals to the Americas, a diverse subset of 71 mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) lineages was chosen for complete genome sequencing from the collection of 1,432 control-region sequences sampled from 18 autochthonous populations of northern, central, eastern, and southwestern Asia. On the basis of complete mtDNA sequencing, we have revised the classification of haplogroups A, D2, G1, M7, and I; identified six new subhaplogroups (I4, N1e, G1c, M7d, M7e, and J1b2a); and fully characterized haplogroups N1a and G1b, which were previously described only by the first hypervariable segment (HVS1) sequencing and coding-region restriction-fragment–length polymorphism analysis. Our findings indicate that the southern Siberian mtDNA pool harbors several lineages associated with the Late Upper Paleolithic and/or early Neolithic dispersals from both eastern Asia and southwestern Asia/southern Caucasus. Moreover, the phylogeography of the D2 lineages suggests that southern Siberia is likely to be a geographical source for the last postglacial maximum spread of this subhaplogroup to northern Siberia and that the expansion of the D2b branch occurred in Beringia 7,000 years ago. In general, a detailed analysis of mtDNA gene pools of northern Asians provides the additional evidence to rule out the existence of a northern Asian route for the initial human colonization of Asia.

This evidence is very compelling for archaeologists and others, for it seems to corroborate what is already known, that Asia was peopled from the south along the Indian subcontinent. However, what it does not explain is why the dental evidence argues for a slightly different approach: the dental evidence argues that there was a large influx of people moving into Asia (and north Asia) from central Europe (i.e., the Caucasus Mountain area) during the Middle Pleistocene. If this is the case, then it looks like there are several migration waves into Asia (based on DNA and dentition), and that much of Christy Turner's work with dental morphology stands: several waves migrated into Asia, and from there a major wave split, sending groups north and groups south, representing his two groups of Sinodonty and Sundadonty.

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