Washington, Sept 27 (ANI): An international team of scientists has discovered that, contrary to the information available till date, modern humans possibly populated Asia in at least two migration waves.
According to David Reich, professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, the original inhabitants who still populate Southeast Asia and Oceania today came from the first migration wave. Later, migrations formed populations in East Asia that are related to the population found in Southeast Asia today.
The comparisons of the DNA of modern humans and prehistoric human species provide new indications of how human populations settled in Asia over 44,000 years ago.
As scientists from Harvard Medical School in Boston (USA) and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig have discovered, the Denisova hominin passed on genetic material not only to populations that live in New Guinea today, but also to Australian aborigines and population groups in the Philippines.
Accordingly, Denisova hominins were spread across an extraordinarily large ecological and geographical area extending from Siberia to tropical Southeast Asia.
"The fact that Denisovan DNA can be detected in some but not other original inhabitant populations living in Southeast Asia today shows that numerous populations with and without Denisovan DNA existed over 44,000 years ago," said Mark Stoneking, professor at the Department of Evolutionary Genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and leading author of the study.
"The simplest explanation for the presence of Denisovan genetic material in some but not all groups is that Denisova people themselves lived in Southeast Asia," he explained.
Scientists from the USA, Germany, India, Taiwan, Japan, Malaysia and the Netherlands contributed to this study. (ANI)
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