Genographic Researchers in Australia Uncover Unique Branches of the Human Family Tree

Migration Route for Archaic Haplogroup C-M130. Courtesy of www.genographic.com

 
Are You Up on Geno Research Down Under?

Genographic Project scientists in Melbourne, Australia have just published their exciting new finds from years of work across the vast southern continent. Detailed in a new paper in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Dr. Robert Mitchell, student Nano Nagle, and their team of researchers worked with 657 Aboriginal Australian men mapping and dating the genetic diversity of the Australian Y chromosome.

Earlier work in Australia had suggested that Aborigines were descendants from the first migrants to leave Africa some 60 thousand years ago. The hypothesis suggests that when modern humans left Africa they remained in tropical regions, migrating north, then east and south around the Indian Ocean through India, Southeast Asia, eventually reaching Australia. Thus, understanding the origins of Australians is paramount to mapping the earliest human migrations.

The data from Nagle and Mitchell’s work supports an early entry into Australia through New Guinea some 50,000 years ago. However, their findings also show that indigenous New Guineans and Aboriginal Australians had been living isolated from one another for more than 30,000 years. Interestingly, before there was even an Australia and New Guinea, lower ocean levels exposed the seafloor between the two lands creating a supercontinent known as Sahul. [...] National Geographic (blogs)