Replies

Note: this topic is from 1/31/2017. Thanks Louis Foxwell.

All modern humans whose ancestry originates outside of Africa owe about 2% of their genome to Neanderthals. Certain populations living in Oceania, such as Papua New Guineans and Australian Aboriginals, share about 4% of their DNA with Denisovans, members of a group named after a cave in the Altai Mountains in Siberia, Russia, where they were discovered. The cave contains remains deposited between 30,000 and 50,000 years ago.

Pacific Islanders' Ancestry Emerges in Genetic Study
In an analysis of the DNA of 1,000 individuals from 41 Pacific populations, an international team of scientists found strong evidence showing that Polynesians and Micronesians in the central and eastern islands had almost no genetic relationship to Melanesians, in the western islands like Papua New Guinea and the Bismarck and Solomons archipelagos. The researchers also concluded that the genetic data showed that the Polynesians and Micronesians were most closely related to Taiwan Aborigines and East Asians. They said this supported the view that these migrating seafarers originated in Taiwan and coastal China at least 3,500 years ago.
Molecular Clockwork And Related Theories
Studying human migrations, Hagelberg and her colleagues were analyzing hundreds of people from Papua-New Guinea and Melanesia. MtDNA samples on Nguna Island showed, as expected, three main population groups from colonizations over thousands of years. But in all three there also occurred a single mutation previously only known from one northern European. Hagenberg and her colleagues (1999) think it highly improbable for such a rare mutation event to occur repeatedly in such an isolated location. A more likely explanation would be recombination between different mitochondrial DNA types... Such findings, if upheld, seriously complicate the basis of using mtDNA to provide straightforward genetic lines, such as assumed in the Mitochondrial Eve hypothesis. The surprising homogeneity in the mtDNA of modern humans interpreted, in the Mitochondrial Eve hypothesis, as resulting from a recent common ancestor, may simply show the dilution of mutations caused by the recombination of mtDNA.
Genomes link aboriginal Australians to Indians
Some aboriginal Australians can trace as much as 11% of their genomes to migrants who reached the island around 4,000 years ago from India, a study suggests. Along with their genes, the migrants brought different tool-making techniques and the ancestors of the dingo, researchers say... It contradicts a commonly held view that Australia had no contact with the rest of the world between the arrival of the first humans around 45,000 years ago and the coming of Europeans in the eighteenth century... Irina Pugach, a postdoctoral researcher in Stoneking’s laboratory, discovered signs of the Indian migration by comparing genetic variation across the entire genomes of 344 individuals, including aboriginal Australians from the Northern Territory, highlanders from Papua New Guinea, several populations from Southeast Asian and India and a handful of people from the United States and China. Pugach 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.
Aboriginal Language Had Ice Age Origins
New genetic evidence suggests Australia may have been populated by two separate groups of humans, one arriving via Papua New Guinea, the other via Indonesia, a researcher says.

Let's See...Who Could it Be???