Ancient DNA suggests human migration into Wallacea was more complex than we thought

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2022-06-10 01:00

Australia; International; QLD; ACT

Wallacea By Altaileopard - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0

To investigate patterns of human dispersal in Wallacea, a group of mainly Indonesian islands, international scientists, including Australians, looked at the DNA of 16 ancient people, between 250 and 2,600 years old, from the North Moluccas, Sulawesi and East Nusa Tenggara, all of which are part of modern-day Indonesia. They found ancestry in the northern islands reflects contact between Austronesian- and Papuan-related groups, while ancestry in the southern islands reveals additional migration from Mainland Southeast Asia that seems to predate the arrival of Austronesians. It had previously been suggested that modern populations in Wallacea arose from migrating Austronesian farmers mixing with indigenous hunter–gatherer communities, but this new research paints a more complex picture.

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Excavation in progress at Jareng Bori rockshelter in Pantar island

Emeritus Professor Peter Bellwood

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Journal/
conference: Nature Ecology & Evolution

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: The Australian National University, Griffith University, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany

Funder: This research was supported by the Max Planck Society. K.N., S.C. and A.P. were supported by the European Research Council Starting Grant ‘Waves’ (no. ERC758967). The research conducted on the samples from Liang Toge, Liang Bua and Komodo was part of a New Zealand Fast-Start Marsden Grant (no. 18-UOO-135). The research conducted on the Jareng Bori site was part of a joint project between the Australian National University Universitas Gadjah Maja funded by an ARC Laureate Project no. FL120100156.

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