Continental Cousins ?

Genetic research conducted by a team of Indian scientists has indicated that aborigines, who initially arrived in Australia via south Asia, may have originated from India. The evidence was found by Dr Raghavendra Rao, who worked with a team of researchers from the Anthropological Survey of India, to find telltale mutations in modern-day Indian populations that are exclusively shared by Aborigines. For the research, the team sequenced 966 complete mitochondrial DNA genomes from Indian ‘relic populations’. “Mitochondrial DNA is inherited only from the mother and so allows us to accurately trace ancestry. We found certain mutations in the DNA sequences of the Indian tribes we sampled that are specific to Australian Aborigines,” said Rao. This shared ancestry suggests that the Aborigine population migrated to Australia via the so-called “Southern Route”. The “Southern Route” dispersal of modern humans suggests movement of a group of hunter-gatherers from the Horn of Africa, across the mouth of the Red Sea into Arabia and southern Asia at least 50 thousand years ago. Subsequently, the modern human populations expanded rapidly along the coastlines of southern Asia, southeastern Asia and Indonesia to arrive in Australia at least 45 thousand years ago. The genetic evidence of this dispersal from the work of Rao and his colleagues is supported by archeological evidence of human occupation in the Lake Mungo area of Australia dated to approximately the same time period.