DNA confirms coastal trek to Australia

Friday, 24 July 2009
Nicky Phillips
ABC

DNA evidence linking Indian tribes to Australian Aboriginal people supports the theory humans arrived in Australia from Africa via a southern coastal route through India, say researchers.

The research, lead by Dr Raghavendra Rao from the Anthropological Survey of India, is published in the current edition of BMC Evolutionary Biology.

One theory is that modern humans arrived in Australia via an inland route through central Asia but Rao says most scientists believe modern humans arrived via the coast of South Asia.

But he says there has never been any evidence to confirm a stop-off in India until now.

Rao and colleagues sequenced the mitochondrial genomes of 966 people from traditional tribes in India.

They report that several of the Indians studied had two regions of their mitochondrial DNA that were identical to those found in modern day Australian Aboriginal people.

The team compared Indian sequences with those from Aboriginal Australians collected in past studies.

Rao and colleagues used computer programs to predict that a common ancestor existed, between the Indian population and Aboriginal Australians, up to 50,000 years ago.

Skeletal remains, dating back between 40-60,000 years from Lake Mungo in New South Wales, also support the theory that modern human arrived in Australia at least as far back as this, he says.

Link through mothers

Rao says he and colleagues sequenced mitochondrial DNA because it is the best type of DNA to use for ancestral studies.

Mitochondrial DNA is passed on by mothers only and does not change much over time.

Evolutionary biologist Dr Jeremy Austin, of the University of Adelaide, says the new data "definitely supports the coastal route hypothesis".

He says that before this research was published, genetic markers from Aboriginal Australians were known to be closely related to markers from traditional Indian and South East Asian peoples.

"But this is the first time people have been able to find these exact same mitochondrial DNA types inside and outside Australia," says Austin.

He says now that a mitochondrial DNA link has been found between tribal Indian populations and Aboriginal Australians it would be interesting to see if a connection exists through the Y chromosome, where DNA is passed only from fathers to sons.

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Thanks for the info :-)

Wow, this actually shows the continuity of Australoid people migration from India since ancient time that also left traces in SEA and also in Australia. I can't take it when people say that our ancestors were from China. I still believe in ancient India!!!

haha who says your ancestors came from china??!! I've never heard that in my life. If anything, indians came from europe due to migration.

lols, actually some "not finished research and theory" which said that our ancestors were from Southern China, and some people still using that "not finished research" as the bolt for their point of view. They did came down from South West China and dwell there for a while, but before that they descend down from North East India : )

But why do most indians look caucasian and were the first aryans?

I think ancient India subcontinent is the melting pot of human just like in other continent. Huh??? Look Caucasian? Might be you are referring to Northern Indians. But there are also some Indians with ancient Caucasian ancestry that live all around India subcontinent. There are also other ethnics like Dravidians, Tibeto-Burman, Austroasians, and others in India subcontinent. We also should get Indian national view on this.

I don't know. Most of the indians I know have prominant noses, sunken-eyes, and other caucasian features. Except for darker skin, most indians look white to me.

the majority of indians i see look like a middle point between south east asians and caucasians. most have smaller less protuding noses( the north west is more like caucasiods) their eyes also aren't as deep set as most caucasiod populations. they also have broader, rounder faces than most caucasiods.

and i ve have said indians don't really look white, you can only say they look more similar to white than say east asians are.

p.s. genetic test have already shown that nost of india except the very north western part and kashmir are genetically west eurasian, that is they don't share much genes with west asia and europe. but form their own cluster in south asia and the closest population to them are south east asians. even western indians are mostly south asian genetically they just have significant paternal DNA contribution from the western eurasia impling invasions from either eastern middle east or western central asia( afghanistan and the like) which supports the notion that indo european languages came from the west not india.

India is the like the Old world and the rest of Eurasia is like the New World in comparison to India. Eurasia was settled from India. This is the latest research from Stephen Oppenheimer. The southern route out of Africa led to India where there was a twenty thousand incubation period before settling of Europe from India. All the Euroracist theories about AIT and the like can be stuffed down the garbage bin. There is a reason why the oldest traces of Australoid population cannot be sen in Europe. That is beacuse Northern route is a lie.

Modern anthropologists don't use Caucasian, Dravidian, Tibeto-Burman, Austronesian classifications anymore. There is no Caucasian ancestry among Indians. And please read the news article in the first post properly.

no india is not the old world or anything like that analogy. it's true that the first wave of miggration out of africa was via the southern coast of the middle east and india which later went to south east asia and australia(even possibly japan), but it was not this wave that lead to europeans and and modern east asians and native americans. the wave of miggration that lead to modern europeans and most of the eurasian people first settled in the middle east then moved onto their respective destinations.

so people did not go to europe from india and india was not the spliting point of eurasian populations, the middle east was that location.

Oh yeah, sorry Vaman. We're too much carried with terms of 19th C Western Anthropologists I guess. We should not differentiate people especially in a nation, everyone should be the same to each other. In here, we mistook ancient Iranian as Caucasian although they are Central Asian, it is not European who call Iranian as Caucasian, but we in SEA because they are fairer than and have prominent nose. Ancient Iranian are not European of course, but they are not mid easterners too.

Well known Indian baiter Michael Witzel admits that R1a1 originated in India. He's still pushing west but Hindu kush is close enough

Geneticist Stephen Oppenheimer on M17 (R1a1)

"For me and for Toomas Kivsild, South Asia is logically the ultimate origin of M17 and his ancestors; and sure enough we find the highest rates and greatest diversity of the M17 line in Pakistan, India, and eastern Iran, and low rates in the Caucasus. M17 is not only more diverse in South Asia than in Central Asia, but diversity characterizes its presence in isolated tribal groups in the south, thus undermining any theory of M17 as a marker of a 'male Aryan invasion' of India. One average estimate for the origin of this line in India is as much as 51,000 years. All this suggests that M17 could have found his way initially from India or Pakistan, through Kashmir, then via Central Asia and Russia, before finally coming into Europe". (p. 152)

http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/journey/ (Graphical presentation of Oppenheimer's research)

it was during the time of pangea when all the continents of the earth were connected as one continent. you had a small tribe of people who went through the southern most tip of india into south east asia and then into australia.

then all the continents got seperated from one another, india became a floating island as well as autralia. people were separated from one another for 10s of thousands of years and developed independently from one another.

indo europeans which are the majority of india's population and dravidians are different from the tribal indians.

iranians are middle eastern, tell me what logic makes you think that iran is not middle eastern?
only afghanistan and western central asia are related to iran other than the middle east and that was mostly before the turko_mongol invasions these western central asians were also genetically similar to other middle easterns.

iran is so central to the middle east that the middle east would not be the way it is with out is it, it has always been a major player in the area.

Dose that mean we OWN australia now?

You need not be sorry mate. But you know no one has commented or didn't bother to comment that this scientific study breaks the notion of Austronesian race. Australian Aborigines were thoughts to be different from Indians, but this study suggests otherwise. It proves that humans are one race. And if somebody argues with you that Austronesians are different from Indians, show him/her this article.

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