Ancient DNA Proves Southeast Asians Arent Who We Thought Dermot Oleary [jEeBZVl7nm0]

For a hundred years, two theories fought over where the people of Southeast Asia come from and in 2018, twenty-six ancient genomes proved both of them wrong. The earliest human DNA ever recovered in the region, pulled from skeletons in Laos and Malaysia up to 8,000 years old, showed that Southeast Asians today descend not from one ancestral people, but from at lionel richie least four separate ancient populations who arrived across thousands of years.

It starts with the Habnhian, hunter-gatherers who lived in the region for some 44,000 years whose closest living relatives today aren't in Southeast Asia at all, but on the remote Andaman Islands, an ocean away. Then came farmers from the river valleys of southern China, Austronesian seafarers into the islands, and a later Bronze Age migration into the mainland. Neither old theory that the foragers simply became the auston matthews trade rumors 2026 modern population, or that farmers replaced them survived contact with the DNA.

This episode follows the landmark study led by Hugh McColl and Eske Willerslev at the Centre for GeoGenetics, University of Copenhagen, published in Science in 2018, with the companion work led by Mark Lipson.

The deeper finding is a quiet one: no population is a pure starting point. The incoming farmers were already mixed before they arrived, and the first people were never erased they're donald campbell folded into everyone who came after.

Discover how ancient DNA rewrote the origin story of an entire region, and what it means for the ancestry hidden in all of us.

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SOURCES CITED

McColl, H. et al. (2018). The prehistoric peopling of Southeast Asia. Science 361(6397):88-92.

Lipson, M. et al. (2018). Ancient genomes document multiple waves of migration in Southeast Asian prehistory. Science 361(6397):92-95.