Sunday, March 26, 2017

Taiwan: a SE Asian nation

In a Facebook discussion of my last piece from Taiwan News, the one in the post below on Taiwan as an Austronesian Ocean Nation, someone posted this gem from Current Biology in 2010 showing the distribution of various genetic markers in East Asia populations. The map shows the distribution of major mtDNA haplogroups in East Asia.

It is not necessary to understand what that means. Just look at the distribution of colors in Taiwan, and compare it to N and S China, elsewhere in northern Asia, and then to SE Asia. Which one does it resemble?

An excerpt...
These caveats aside, it is our view that an early southern dispersal remains so far the best explanation for the genetic data, and we would like to emphasize that with more accurate dating of mtDNA and NRY haplogroups, additional autosomal DNA data, and with the simulation-based modeling approach advocated here, the early southern dispersal route may be expected to be supported and illuminated further, rather than contradicted. Indeed, the recent Pan-Asian SNP study found strong support for a largely southern origin of extant southeast and east Asian populations [12].
Recall that pro-China types constantly assert that Taiwan's indigenous peoples came out of China, not out of the south.
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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

That's strange. This 1992 paper
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1204787/pdf/ge1301139.pdf
has already come to that conclusion. Was there that little progress after all those years?
Some excerpts:
"The greatest mtDNA diversity and the highest frequency of mtDNAs with HfiaI/HincII morph 1 were observed in the Vietnamese suggesting a Southern Mongoloid origin of Asians"
"The data provide evidence that: (1) the Vietnamese are the most diverse and, hence, the oldest population"
"In summary, all Southeast Asian populations analyzed in this study appear to have common origins, consistent with a hypothesized southern Mongoloid origin of the peoples in this region (BELLWOOD 1985, and references therein; TURNER 1987)"