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An ancient coronavirus, or a closely related pathogen, triggered an epidemic among ancestors of present-day East Asians roughly 25,000 years ago, a new study indicates.Analysis of DNA from more than 2,000 people shows that genetic changes in response to that persistent epidemic accumulated over the next 20,000 years or so, David Enard, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Arizona in Tucson, reported April 8 at the virtual annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. The finding raises the possibility that some East Asians today have inherited biological adaptations to coronaviruses or closely related viruses.The discovery opens the...

The early settlement of anatomically modern humans in MSEA dates back to at least 65 thousand years ago (kya) and is associated with the formation of a hunter-gatherer tradition called Hoabinhian. Since the Neolithic period, which dates to about ~4,000-5,000 years ago, cultural transitions and diversification have happened multiple times.. ...Vietnam has a population size of more than 96 million people comprising 54 official ethnic groups; 110 languages are spoken in the country. To date, there are hundreds of ethnolinguistic groups in MSEA, speaking languages belonging to five major language families: Austro-Asiatic (AA), Austronesian (AN), Hmong-Mien (HM), Tai-Kadai (TK), and...