The Subcontinent India is located at the South-Central part of Eurasia, and has been the cross-roads of human dispersal.1 Now in this issue of Journal of Human Genetics, Rene J Herrera and collaborators showed a new genetic connection between one isolated tribe in India, Soliga and Aborigines in Australia.2 The Soliga tribe is distributed in the state of Karnataka, Southern India, and phenotypically resemble the Australian Aborigines. This study may be the first one to show that a particular human population in this Subcontinent may be phylogenetically close to Aborigines. Interestingly, morphological similarity between some tribes in Southern India and Australian Aborigines was already noticed by Thomas H. Huxley in 1870.3 After 140 years, Huxley's assertion was shown to be probably true.

Short tandem repeat (STR) or microsatellite DNA loci have high mutation rates, and genetic heterogeneity for one locus is often pretty high. STRs are therefore often used for human population study. For example, Japanese populations were shown to be more closely related with coastal than inland Han populations using 105 STR polymorphism data.4 Morlote et al.2 examined 15 autosomal STR polymorphism for the Soliga population. Although the number of STR loci compared was not large, they successfully showed a close genetic relationship of the Soliga people and Australian Aborigines.

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