MBE Advance Access published online on March 21, 2008
Molecular Biology and Evolution, doi:10.1093/molbev/msn068
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research article |
Climate Change and Post-Glacial Human Dispersals in Southeast Asia
1 Institute of Integrative and Comparative Biology, Faculty of Biological Sciences, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK
2 Transfusion Medicine and Anthropology Laboratory, Mackay Memorial Hospital, Tamsui, Taiwan
3 Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
4 Department of Health, Tainan Hospital, Tainan City, Taiwan
5 The Estonian Biocentre, Tartu, Estonia
6 Department of Forensic and Chemical Sciences, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK
7 Department of Statistics, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK
8 School of Archaeology and Anthropology, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia
9 School of Anthropology, University of Oxford, Oxford
Corresponding author: Martin B. Richards, Institute of Integrative and Comparative Biology, Faculty of Biological Sciences, L.C. Miall Building, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK. Phone.: +44 0113–343 2984, Fax: +44 0113–323 2835, E-mail: m.b.richards{at}leeds.ac.uk
Received for publication January 2, 2008. Revision received February 25, 2008. Revision received March 10, 2008. Accepted for publication March 17, 2008.
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 
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.
Key Words: Complete mtDNA genomes • Island Southeast Asia • Neolithic • post-glacial • late-glacial
These authors contributed equally to this work.