Genomic Analysis Links Australian Aborigines to Indians. (January 15, 2013)

A report in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences^§ states that some 11% of the Australian aboriginal genome to individuals who reached the continent about 4,000 years ago from India, thereby contradicting the belief that the first Australians lived in complete isolation beginning some 45,000 years ago until the significant European influx beginning in the 18th century.

Mark Stoneking, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, who led the study told Nature's Ed Yong: "Australia is thought to represent one of the earliest migrations for humans after they left Africa, but it seemed pretty isolated after that."

In fact it was Irina Pugach, a postdoctoral researcher in Professor Stoneking’s laboratory who "confirmed an ancient association between the genomes of Australians, New Guineans and the Mamanwa — a Negrito group from the Philippines. These populations diverged around 36,000 years ago, suggesting that they all descended from an early southward migration out of Africa. However, she also found evidence of gene flow between the two "around 141 generations ago".

"There have been very few genetic studies of Australians," Professor Stoneking told Nature, "and not anything like the dense, genome-wide study we carried out."

Nevertheless, Sheila van Holst Pellekaan, a geneticist at the University of New South Wales told Mr Yong the "finding is 'definitely not representative of Australia,' because it only looked at people from the Northern Territories. She believes that the Aboriginals' vast genetic diversity suggests that multiple waves of migration could have occurred, but that new genes would not always have dispersed through the pre-existing peoples".

In fact Professor Stoneking agrees and notes: "We and a lot of other people would be interested in getting more genetic samples, but it’s very difficult to do that."

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^§Pugach, I., Delfin, F., Gunnarsdóttir, E., Kayser, M. & Stoneking, M. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1211927110 (2013).