# Population Genetics > Paleogenetics > Paleolithic & Mesolithic >  40,000 year old sample from Asia-Tianyuan Cave

## Angela

See:
40,000-Year-Old Individual from Asia Provides
Insight into Early Population Structure in Eurasia

Melinda A. Yang, Xing Gao,
Christoph Theunert, ..., Svante Pa€abo, €
Janet Kelso, Qiaomei Fu

"In Brief
Yang et al. show that the genome of a 40
kya individual from Tianyuan cave near
Beijing is more similar to Asians than to
Europeans, past or present. His similarity
to a 35 kya European and to individuals
from some South American populations
suggests a persistence of population
structure in Asia that lasted until the
colonization of the Americas."

"SUMMARY
By at least 45,000 years before present, anatomically
modern humans had spread across Eurasia [1–3],
but it is not well known how diverse these early populations
were and whether they contributed substantially
to later people or represent early modern human
expansions into Eurasia that left no surviving descendants
today. Analyses of genome-wide data from
several ancient individuals from Western Eurasia and
Siberia have shown that some of these individuals
have relationships to present-day Europeans [4, 5]
while others did not contribute to present-day
Eurasian populations [3, 6]. As contributions from Upper
Paleolithic populations in Eastern Eurasia to present-day
humans and their relationship to other early
Eurasians is not clear, we generated genome-wide
data from a 40,000-year-old individual from Tianyuan
Cave, China, [1, 7] to study his relationship to ancient
and present-day humans. We find that he is more
related to present-day and ancient Asians than he is
to Europeans, but he shares more alleles with a
35,000-year-old European individual than he shares
with other ancient Europeans, indicating that the separation
between early Europeans and early Asians was
not a single population split. We also find that the Tianyuan
individual shares more alleles with some Native
American groups in South America than with Native
Americans elsewhere, providing further support for
population substructure in Asia [8] and suggesting
that this persisted from 40,000 years ago until the colonization
of the Americas. Our study of the Tianyuan individual
highlights the complex migration and subdivision
of early human populations in Eurasia"


See the three figures here:
http://www.cell.com/action/showImage...2817%2931195-8

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## bicicleur

his/her mtDNA was already known, it is B, which is present in China and southeast Asia and among Native Americans

now we have autosomal too
nothing surprising, except the resemblance with Goyet
I would guess he is related the founding father of the C1a1 clade which is concentrated in the Ryukyu Islands today

I'll read it in detail later

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## Angela

More on Tianyuan man:

See:
https://gnxp.nofe.me/2017/10/15/189754/

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## halfalp

Finally an important old sample from far East. I always think that, our ancestors, evolved a lot of time in India, and that Goyet and even Kostenki are related to the first people going out of india in every directions. Mtdna haplogroup B is born approximatively the same time that U and both coming from R. Certainly both coming from India, later U1, U5, U6 separate from U,2,3,4,7,8,9 the first three going in middle east and the later going in central asia and throught there in west and east. But maybe not !

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