YAN Shi

CAS-MPG Partner Institute for Computational Biology, SIBS, CAS, Shanghai 200013, China

ABSTRACT: To understand the history of the world population is one of the main interests of anthropologists, historians, archaeologists and linguists. Since the 1990s, along with the development of biological science and techniques, molecular genetics has become a powerful tool for unveiling the origin and migration of the populations in the world, and gave birth to molecular anthropology. Especially, we can reconstruct a patrilineal tree of all males using the sequences of Y chromosome. Through phylogenetic investigations, we can trace back to the nearest common paternal ancestor of all the living human beings (Y-chromosomal Adam) in Africa at no more than 200ky BP, and to the ancestors of all the modern Eurasian people went out of Africa at less than 100ky BP. The distribution of haplogroups of Y chromosome is associated to geographical regions and highly related to language families, e.g., Haplogroups O, N, C, and D are concentrated in eastern and southeastern Asia, and the ancestor of Indo-Europeans are believed to have high frequency of Haplogroups R1a. Moreover, by detecting ancient DNA, we can compare and link modern and ancient peoples and reconstruct the migration routes.