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Tracing the route of modern humans out of Africa by using 225 human genome sequences from Ethiopians and Egyptians
- Source :
- The American Journal of Human Genetics
- Publication Year :
- 2015
-
Abstract
- The predominantly African origin of all modern human populations is well established, but the route taken out of Africa is still unclear. Two alternative routes, via Egypt and Sinai or across the Bab el Mandeb strait into Arabia, have traditionally been proposed as feasible gateways in light of geographic, paleoclimatic, archaeological, and genetic evidence. Distinguishing among these alternatives has been difficult. We generated 225 whole-genome sequences (225 at 8× depth, of which 8 were increased to 30×; Illumina HiSeq 2000) from six modern Northeast African populations (100 Egyptians and five Ethiopian populations each represented by 25 individuals). West Eurasian components were masked out, and the remaining African haplotypes were compared with a panel of sub-Saharan African and non-African genomes. We showed that masked Northeast African haplotypes overall were more similar to non-African haplotypes and more frequently present outside Africa than were any sets of haplotypes derived from a West African population. Furthermore, the masked Egyptian haplotypes showed these properties more markedly than the masked Ethiopian haplotypes, pointing to Egypt as the more likely gateway in the exodus to the rest of the world. Using five Ethiopian and three Egyptian high-coverage masked genomes and the multiple sequentially Markovian coalescent (MSMC) approach, we estimated the genetic split times of Egyptians and Ethiopians from non-African populations at 55,000 and 65,000 years ago, respectively, whereas that of West Africans was estimated to be 75,000 years ago. Both the haplotype and MSMC analyses thus suggest a predominant northern route out of Africa via Egypt.
- Subjects :
- Human Migration
Population
Egypt, Ancient
Molecular Sequence Data
Black People
Biology
Coalescent theory
03 medical and health sciences
Genetic
Principal Component Analysi
Out of africa
Report
Genetics
Haplotype
Humans
Genetics(clinical)
education
Genetics (clinical)
History, Ancient
030304 developmental biology
African Continental Ancestry Group
0303 health sciences
education.field_of_study
Genetic diversity
Principal Component Analysis
Base Sequence
Geography
Models, Genetic
Human migration
business.industry
Genome, Human
030305 genetics & heredity
High-Throughput Nucleotide Sequencing
Markov Chain
Biological Evolution
Markov Chains
Haplotypes
Evolutionary biology
Homo sapiens
Human genome
Egypt
Ethiopia
business
Human
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 15376605
- Volume :
- 96
- Issue :
- 6
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- American journal of human genetics
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....408ac6f33188c5400c4fb57813caf3cd