East Asia

An updated age for the Xujiayao hominin from the Nihewan Basin, North China: Implications for Middle Pleistocene human evolution in East Asia

The Xujiayao site in the Nihewan Basin (North China) is one of the most important Paleolithic sites in East Asia… Here, we report new ages for the Xujiayao hominin… dating results indicate a pooled average age of 260–370 ka for the Homo-bearing layer, which is consistent with its position within the middle Brunhes normal polarity chron indicated by magnetostratigraphy. This age estimate makes the Xujiayao hominin among the oldest mid-Pleistocene hominins with derived Neanderthal traits in East Asia.

Reconstructing genetic history of Siberian and Northeastern European populations

Siberia and Northwestern Russia are home to over 40 culturally and linguistically diverse indigenous ethnic groups, yet genetic variation and histories of peoples from this region are largely uncharacterized. We present deep whole-genome sequencing data (∼38×) from 28 individuals belonging to 14 distinct indigenous populations from that region.

Refined phylogenetic structure of an abundant East Asian Y-chromosomal haplogroup O*-M134

The human Y-chromosome haplogroup O-M134 is one of the most abundant paternal lineages in East Asian populations, comprising ~13% of Han Chinese males, and also common in Kazakh, Korean, Japanese, Thai and so on. Despite its considerable prevalence, its current substructure is poorly resolved with only one downstream marker (M117) previously investigated. Here we address this deficiency by investigating some single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) previously reported being potentially associated with O-M134 based on high-throughput DNA-sequencing data.

A17

Haplogroup A17 is a branch on the maternal tree of humanity. Its age has not been determined, but its likely origin is in Asia.

B4b1a1

Haplogroup B4b1a1 is a branch on the maternal tree of human kind. Its age is between 1,100 and 5,500 years (Behar et al., 2012b).

B4g

Haplogroup B4g is a branch on the maternal tree of human kind. Its age is between 8,400 and 21,900 years (Behar et al., 2012b).

B5b

Haplogroup B5b is a branch on the maternal tree of humanity.

Human Remains from the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition of Southwest China Suggest a Complex Evolutionary History for East Asians

Later Pleistocene human evolution in East Asia remains poorly understood owing to a scarcity of well described, reliably classified and accurately dated fossils. Southwest China has been identified from genetic research as a hotspot of human diversity, containing ancient mtDNA and Y-DNA lineages, and has yielded a number of human remains thought to derive from Pleistocene deposits. We have prepare

Major Population Expansion of East Asians Began before Neolithic Time: Evidence of mtDNA Genomes

It is a major question in archaeology and anthropology whether human populations started to grow primarily after the advent of agriculture, i.e., the Neolithic time, especially in East Asia, which was one of the centers of ancient agricultural civilization. To answer this question requires an accurate estimation of the time of lineage expansion as well as that of population expansion in a populati

An updated tree of Y-chromosome Haplogroup O and revised phylogenetic positions of mutations P164 and PK4

Y-chromosome Haplogroup O is the dominant lineage of East Asians, comprising more than a quarter of all males on the world; however, its internal phylogeny remains insufficiently investigated. In this study, we determined the phylogenetic position of recently defined markers (L127, KL1, KL2, P164, and PK4) in the background of Haplogroup O.