Abstract
The genetic history of Southern East Asians is not well-known, especially prior to the Neolithic period. To address this, we successfully sequenced two complete mitochondrial genomes of 11,000-year-old human individuals from Southern China, thus generating the oldest ancient DNA sequences from this area. Integrating published mitochondrial genomes, we characterized M71d, a new subhaplogroup of haplogroup M71. Our results suggest a possible early migration between Southern China and mainland Southeast Asia by at least 22,000 BP.
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Data availability
The whole mitochondrial genome sequence data reported in this paper have been deposited in the Genome Warehouse in National Genomics Data Center, Beijing Institute of Genomics (China National Center for Bioinformation), Chinese Academy of Sciences, under accession number GWHANOT01000000 and GWHANOU01000000 that is publicly accessible at https://bigd.big.ac.cn/.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank A.M. Ko, and E.A. Bennett for comments.
Funding
This work was supported by the CAS (XDB26000000) and NSFC (91731303, 41925009, and 41630102).
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Bai, F., Zhang, X., Ji, X. et al. Paleolithic genetic link between Southern China and Mainland Southeast Asia revealed by ancient mitochondrial genomes. J Hum Genet 65, 1125–1128 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s10038-020-0796-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s10038-020-0796-9
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