Substack cometh, and lo it is good. (Pricing)

The humans of Wallacea


A new open-access paper, Genome of a middle Holocene hunter-gatherer from Wallacea:

Much remains unknown about the population history of early modern humans in southeast Asia, where the archaeological record is sparse and the tropical climate is inimical to the preservation of ancient human DNA. So far, only two low-coverage pre-Neolithic human genomes have been sequenced from this region. Both are from mainland Hòabìnhian hunter-gatherer sites: Pha Faen in Laos, dated to 7939–7751 calibrated years before present (yr cal BP; present taken as AD 1950), and Gua Cha in Malaysia (4.4–4.2 kyr cal BP). Here we report, to our knowledge, the first ancient human genome from Wallacea, the oceanic island zone between the Sunda Shelf (comprising mainland southeast Asia and the continental islands of western Indonesia) and Pleistocene Sahul (Australia–New Guinea). We extracted DNA from the petrous bone of a young female hunter-gatherer buried 7.3–7.2 kyr cal BP at the limestone cave of Leang Panninge in South Sulawesi, Indonesia. Genetic analyses show that this pre-Neolithic forager, who is associated with the ‘Toalean’ technocomplex shares most genetic drift and morphological similarities with present-day Papuan and Indigenous Australian groups, yet represents a previously unknown divergent human lineage that branched off around the time of the split between these populations approximately 37,000 years ago. We also describe Denisovan and deep Asian-related ancestries in the Leang Panninge genome, and infer their large-scale displacement from the region today.

The best model seems to be the one to the right: the new Wallacean hunter-gatherer has some ancestry deeply related to Australo-Melanesians, and, another proportion of its ancestry is deeply related to East Asians. In particular, the East Asian-related ancestry seems to be basal or deeply diverged from the paleo-Southern East Asian ancestry. There’s a lot in the structure of ancient East Asian populations that I think we’re pretty unclear about, and need more DNA to really understand what’s going on.

But, I do want to mention that in about 24 hours I’ll be posting a discussion I had with Max Larena about the Denisovan admixture in the Phillippines on my Substack. It’ll be ungated in a few weeks.

Max, and this paper, convince me that Peter Bellwood’s simple model of the spread of farming into Southeast Asia ~4,000 years ago is probably wrong on some level. Too bad, it was a nice simple story. Basically, Northeast Asian populations may have had a presence further south far earlier, and they may have been hunter-gatherers initially.

One thought on “The humans of Wallacea

  1. Amazing diagram and a really serious science about the Denisovan admixture in the Philippines. It is even more amazing how the science could not find, for e.g., neither traces of sc. Slavs thirteen or so centuries ago, nor how and where they originated from, nor how silently without anyone seeing them (their calculated procession should be 1500 km long) smuggled from Ukraine (or steppe?) to Balkan and apparently have eaten all locals, who suddenly disappeared from the face of the Earth. Maybe D.Ross (with Walt’s little help) can dig something from wiki?

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