Abstract
The regional distribution of an ancient Y-chromosome haplogroup C-M130 (Hg C) in Asia provides an ideal tool of dissecting prehistoric migration events. We identified 465 Hg C individuals out of 4284 males from 140 East and Southeast Asian populations. We genotyped these Hg C individuals using 12 Y-chromosome biallelic markers and 8 commonly used Y-short tandem repeats (Y-STRs), and performed phylogeographic analysis in combination with the published data. The results show that most of the Hg C subhaplogroups have distinct geographical distribution and have undergone long-time isolation, although Hg C individuals are distributed widely across Eurasia. Furthermore, a general south-to-north and east-to-west cline of Y-STR diversity is observed with the highest diversity in Southeast Asia. The phylogeographic distribution pattern of Hg C supports a single coastal ‘Out-of-Africa’ route by way of the Indian subcontinent, which eventually led to the early settlement of modern humans in mainland Southeast Asia. The northward expansion of Hg C in East Asia started ∼40 thousand of years ago (KYA) along the coastline of mainland China and reached Siberia ∼15 KYA and finally made its way to the Americas.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to all the voluntary donors of DNA samples in this study. We thank Tatiana M Karafet, Li Hui, Sanghamitra Sengupta and Brigitte Pakendorf for providing their published STR data of Hg C. We thank Pingping Tan and Hui Zhang for their technical assistance. This study was supported by grants from the National 973 project of China (2006CB701506, 2007CB947701 ), the Chinese Academy of Sciences (KSCX1-YW-R-34), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (30413242, 30525028, 30700445, 30630013 and 30771181), and the Natural Science Foundation of Yunnan Province of China (2007C100M). We also thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions.
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Zhong, H., Shi, H., Qi, XB. et al. Global distribution of Y-chromosome haplogroup C reveals the prehistoric migration routes of African exodus and early settlement in East Asia. J Hum Genet 55, 428–435 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/jhg.2010.40
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/jhg.2010.40
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