An Aboriginal Australian Genome Reveals Separate Human Dispersals into Asia

By M. Rasmussen, Xiaosen Guo, Yong Wang, K. Lohmueller, Simon Rasmussen, Anders Albrechtsen, L. Skotte, Stinus Lindgreen, M. Metspalu, Thibaut Jombart and 48 more. Science, 2011

746 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Whole-genome data indicate that early modern humans expanded into Australia 62,000 to 75,000 years ago. 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.

Subfields: Archeology, Genetics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/054dcae2024bd7817effaf53d5d7cebb07a34508

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In Archeology

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Citations in the corpus

The process, biotic impact, and global implications of the human colonization of Sahul about 47,000 years ago (2015, background): “multi-migration scenario for E Asia and Sahul (McEvoy et al., 2011; Rasmussen et al., 2011), still date the initial post-L3 divergence events to 70e60 ka, inconsistent with an EDM.”
Indigenous body parts, mutating temporalities, and the half-lives of postcolonial technoscience (2013, background): “The researchers’ decision to seek approval from an indigenous organization generated much debate among scientists (Calloway, 2011; Rasmussen et al., 2011).”
Characterization of ancient and modern genomes by SNP detection and phylogenomic and metagenomic analysis using PALEOMIX (2014, background): “Clearly the paleo-genomic era had been unleashed, and today a series of additional ancient genomes have been characterized, including those of an ~100-year-old Australian Aborigine 17 , the Copper Age Iceman 18 , an ~24,000-year-old ancient Siberian from Mal’ta 19 , as well as high-quality genomes f”
A genomic history of Aboriginal Australia (2016, background): “To date, only three whole genome sequences have been described - one deriving from a historical tuft of hair from Western Desert Australia 20 and two others from cell lines with limited provenance information 44 .”
Inference of Population Splits and Mixtures from Genome-Wide Allele Frequency Data (2012, background): “notably, to infer the existence of gene flow between modern and archaic humans [39,41,42], as well as between diverged modern human populations [37,43,44].”
Accurate sex identification of ancient human remains using DNA shotgun sequencing (2013, background): “These included a 100 year old hair sample from an aboriginal Australian (Rasmussen et al., 2011), a 4000 year old hair sample from a Paleo-eskimo (Saqqaq) (Rasmussen et al., 2010), four w5000 year old Neolithic Scandinavian individuals (Skoglund et al., 2012), one 5300 year old individual from the…”