To the antipode of Asia

To the antipode of Asia

Markers show populations sampled by HUGO Pan-Asian SNP Consortium

The Pith: Southeast Asia was settled by a series of distinct peoples. The pattern of settlement can be discerned in part by examination of patterns of genetic variation. It seems likely that Austro-Asiatic populations were dominant across the western half of Indonesia before the arrival of Austronesians.

About a year and a half ago I reviewed a paper in Science which did a first pass through some of the findings suggested by the HUGO Pan-Asian SNP Consortium data set, which pooled a wide range of Asian populations. You can see the locations on the map above (alas, the labels are too small to read the codes). The important issue in relation to this data set is that it has a thick coverage of Southeast Asia, which is not well represented in the HGDP. Unfortunately there are only ~50,000 markers, which is not optimal for really fine-grained intra-regional analysis in my opinion. But better than nothing, and definitely sufficient for coarser scale analysis.

A few things have changed since I first reviewed this paper. First, I pulled down a copy …

Razib Khan