MBE Advance Access published online on February 4, 2003
Molecular Biology and Evolution, doi:10.1093/molbev/msg026
Molecular Biology and Evolution © Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution 2003; all rights reserved
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1 Kunming Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Kunming, Yunnan, 650223, China; Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: zhangyp{at}public.km.yn.cn.
The decipherment of the meager information provided by short fragments of ancient mtDNA is notoriously difficult but is regarded as a most promising way towards reconstructing the past from the genetic perspective. By haplogroup-specific HVS-I (&-II) motif search and (near-) matching with available modern data sets, most of the ancient mtDNAs could be tentatively assigned to haplogroups, which are often subcontinent-specific. Further typing for mtDNA haplogroup-diagnostic coding region polymorphisms, however, would be indispensable in order to establish the geographic/genetic affinities of ancient samples with less ambiguity. In the present study, we sequenced a fragment ( Key Words:
Keywords: mtDNA, ancient DNA, Han Chinese
© 2003 Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution
Original Articles
Reconstructing the evolutionary history of China: a caveat about inferences drawn from ancient DNA
2 Taishan Medical College, Taian, Shandong, 271000, China
3 Fachbereich Mathematik, Universität Hamburg, 20146 Hamburg, Germany
4 Kunming Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Kunming, Yunnan, 650223, China
Abstract 
982bp) of the mtDNA control region in 76 Han individuals from Taian, Shandong, China, and combined these data with previously reported samples from Zibo and Qingdao, Shandong. The reanalysis of two previously published ancient mtDNA population data from Linzi (same province) then indicates that the ancient populations had features in common with the modern populations from south China rather than any specific affinity to the European mtDNA pool. Our results highlight that ancient mtDNA data obtained under different sampling schemes and subject to potential contamination could easily create the impression of drastic spatiotemporal changes in the genetic structure of a regional population during the past few thousand years when inappropriate methods of data analysis are employed.
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