# Population Genetics > Autosomal Genetics >  Which has greater autosomal genetic diversity: Europe or China?

## Tomenable

Are intra-European genetic differences greater than intra-Chinese genetic differences? 

I mean differences between both ethnically and geographically distinct populations, such as: Northern vs. Southern, Western vs. Eastern, South-Western vs. North-Eastern, South-Eastern vs. North-Western respectively Europeans and Chinese.

Obviously several groups are genetic outliers in both areas. What if we exclude outliers?

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## Tomenable

China has more inhabitants than Europe, and a territory comparable in size to Europe:

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## Tomenable

AFAIK the Chinese are a mostly Neolithic-descended population, without any Post-Neolithic replacement. On the other hand, in Europe there was a Post-Neolithic, Bronze Age replacement and a process of homogenization, caused by the massive migration from the Steppe. So Europeans are a younger population, and thus I guess that they should be even more homogeneous.

See the most recent summary of Europe's population history:

http://biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/e...72926.full.pdf

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## bicicleur

> AFAIK the Chinese are a mostly Neolithic-descended population, without any Post-Neolithic replacement. On the other hand, in Europe there was a Post-Neolithic, Bronze Age replacement and a process of homogenization, caused by the massive migration from the Steppe. So Europeans are a younger population, and thus I guess that they should be even more homogeneous.
> 
> See the most recent summary of Europe's population history:
> 
> http://biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/e...72926.full.pdf


Indeed, and on top of that there was the expansion by the Han emperors.
Other populations like the Tai-Kadai were defeated and fled further south.
Many people in defeated areas were enslaved and the emperor stimulated colonisation of the conquered areas by Han Chinese people.
There were some later intrusions from steppe people though, mainly Mongols.

In Europe there was never a single European empire covering the whole of Europe.



the uniformity is also visible in the Y-DNA

Southeast Asia is also derived from the Chinese neolithic

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## Tomenable

OK, I made a comparison *(based on data from this graph):*

https://jaymans.files.wordpress.com/...tances-map.jpg

Left side (map) = geographical distances (sampling locations)

Right side (graph) = genetical distances between populations



^^^ 
*Conclusion:*

Europeans are about as close to each other, as are the Chinese (+ Koreans + Japanese).

*However,* when we exclude "genetic outliers" among Europeans, such as:

- Komi and Mari
- Sardinians
- the Adygei
- Lapps (Sami)

Then after such exclusion, the rest of Europeans are *more closely* related than Chinese.

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## Tomenable

> the uniformity is also visible in the Y-DNA


Haplogroup *O* is on the same level as haplogroup *R*, which dominates in Europe.

Except that *R* is younger (or rather: it expanded in Europe more recently) than *O*.

Anyway, if you claim that being predominantly O makes China homogeneous, I could as well say that there is no difference between Dravidians with R2 and Basques with R1. Do you see the fallacy? You lumped all of O together, while splitting R.

There are various branches of O, and many of them are thousands of years old.

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## bicicleur

> Haplogroup *O* is on the same level as haplogroup *R*, which dominates in Europe.
> 
> Except that *R* is younger (or rather: it expanded in Europe more recently) than *O*.
> 
> Anyway, if you claim that being predominantly O makes China homogeneous, I could as well say that there is no difference between Dravidians with R2 and Basques with R1. Do you see the fallacy? You lumped all of O together, while splitting R.
> 
> There are various branches of O, and many of them are thousands of years old.


that is true, but haplo O has much more common history then R1 and R2.
all haplo O was involved in the Chinese neolithic, between the Yellow and the Yangtze rivers and they started to expand from there not earlier than ca 5.5 ka

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## Angela

It would seem that looking at fst data figures would answer the question, and that information has been known for a long time.

Europe:
"In this study, Fst (Fixation index) was found to correlate considerably with geographic distances ranging from ≤0.0010 for neighbouring populations to 0.0230 for Southern Italy andFinland."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Europe#Population_structure

Han Chinese:
"*Our results showed that the Han Chinese population is intricately substructured, with the main observed clusters corresponding roughly to northern Han, central Han, and southern Han. However, simulated case-control studies showed that genetic differentiation among these clusters, although very small (FST = 0.0002 ∼0.0009), is sufficient to lead to an inflated rate of false-positive results even when the sample size is moderate.** "*

http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2009/11/wo-papers-on-genetic-structure-of-han.html
http://www.cell.com/AJHG/abstract/S0002-9297(09)00470-4

For comparison:
"Pair-wise FST statistics Northern and Southern Italy amounts approximately to 0.001". 

The answer is clear, yes?

See also:
http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2008/12/genetic-structure-in-east-asia-using.html
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/art...l.pone.0003862

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2011/07/how-chinese-genetics-is-like-chinese-food/#.V9XJTJgrLNN

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## johen

> AFAIK the Chinese are a mostly Neolithic-descended population, without any Post-Neolithic replacement. On the other hand, in Europe there was a Post-Neolithic, Bronze Age replacement and a process of homogenization, caused by the massive migration from the Steppe. *So Europeans are a younger population,* and* thus I guess that they should be even more homogeneous.
> *
> See the most recent summary of Europe's population history:
> 
> http://biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/e...72926.full.pdf


Pleas don't underestimate nomad in the eastern steppe, constructing their history with their swords, not historical records.

First Mongol, by wiki



> *Chinese dynasties had approximately 120 million inhabitants; after the conquest was completed in 1279, the 1300 census reported roughly 60 million people*


Whom did the mongol kill mostly, men or women? And it was proved by science.



> Genghis Khan has been branded the greenest invader in history - after his murderous conquests killed so many people that huge swathes of cultivated land returned to forest.
> The Mongol leader, who established a vast empire between the 13th and 14th centuries, helped remove nearly 700million tons of carbon from the atmosphere, claims a new study.


But another mass killing by another mongol of manchu, Qing dynasty by science. Whom did they kill, women or men?




> The Carnegie study measured the carbon impact of a number of historical events that involved a large number of deaths.
> Time periods also looked at included the Black Death in Europe, _the fall of China's Ming Dynasty_ and the conquest of the Americas.


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencete...s-dropped.html

Probably, modern Chinese would be far younger than modern European.

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## bicicleur

> OK, I made a comparison *(based on data from this graph):*
> 
> https://jaymans.files.wordpress.com/...tances-map.jpg
> 
> Left side (map) = geographical distances (sampling locations)
> 
> Right side (graph) = genetical distances between populations
> 
> 
> ...


If you start to eliminate in Europe, then in China you could eliminate every non-Han, because the Han make up the vast majority all over China.
The structure in China is completely different from Europe.

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## bicicleur

> Pleas don't underestimate nomad in the eastern steppe, constructing their history with their swords, not historical records.
> 
> First Mongol, by wiki
> 
> 
> Whom did the mongol kill mostly, men or women? And it was proved by science.
> 
> 
> But another mass killing by another mongol of manchu, Qing dynasty by science. Whom did they kill, women or men?
> ...


one could say the whole world population is not older than the industrial revolution



that might be the reason for the low diversities today
bottlenecks before that time will have little effect to the todays diversity

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## Tomenable

I have been told that Fst distances are not really that informative: 




> Fst-distances are easily inflated by drift and bottlenecks, which don't really tell of genetic diversity (if you put something like a Friuli Venezia Giulian isolate population in European sample it'll be more "distant" from average than Sardinians or Chuvash fst-wise). *You need to look variant counts and allelic sharing, and the dataset needs to be 1000genomes or something else with millions of markers. But your conclusion about China being more diverse could still be right, even if discounting the obvious outliers like Uyghurs*


=========================================

Bicicleur:




> then in China you could eliminate every non-Han


But who is really "Han" and who is "Non-Han"? Can we trust official Chinese data?

I have been told that 124 minority groups are not officially recognized by China:




> It currently has over 90 % of its country described as one ethnic group, the Han (the world's largest), with a group of other National Minorities. *However in 1949 when the call for minorities came to register, over 180 originally applied, but only 56 made the cut. The other 120 were lumped together, from the Sea Gipsies to the semi-nomadic Hakka, to the Polynesian sourcing Hainanese and Min*.


So it seems that a lot of minority groups are being lumped together with the Han.

Ethnic and regional diversity in appearance seems to be similar to European one:



Hong Kong:



Liaoning:



Tajiks from Kashgar:

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## bicicleur

Han people are believed to be originated vaguely from the area of the Yellow and Han river (Longshan culture) and who later became loyal to the emperors.
They colonised all China as the emperor conquered more territories.
These people are mainly O2 and a lot of them O2-M134.
But before the Han emperors, also the area around the Yangzi delta (Shangai area) became incorporated in the empire.
These people were mainly O1a-M119, the forfathers of the speakers of Austronesian languages (pacific Ocean).

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## bicicleur

IMO rice agriculture originated in the yellow sea, which is very shallow and was dry land during LGM. Tribes were N & O.
Rice agriculture arrived in China 9 ka because of rising sea levels. North China farmer-hunters were N, not O. Central China were O.
N was driven out by Longshan culture O.

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## Tomenable

How genetically close are Koreans and Japanese to Han and to each other ?

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## Angela

Every tool used by geneticists has its limitations. Fst is adequate for this kind of comparison. I remember reading analyses of the Han based on a number of tests that shows any random pair of them is as related to each other as Europeans are to their first cousins, and the _vast majority_ of the inhabitants of China are Han. 

As to the other East Asian groups, I guess a lot of people don't follow links. From upthread:

"Accounting for population genetic substructure is important in reducing type 1 errors in genetic studies of complex disease. As efforts to understand complex genetic disease are expanded to different continental populations the understanding of genetic substructure within these continents will be useful in design and execution of association tests. In this study, *population differentiation (Fst) and Principal Components Analyses (PCA) are examined using >200 K genotypes from multiple populations of East Asian ancestry.* The population groups included those from the *Human Genome Diversity Panel* [Cambodian, Yi, Daur, Mongolian, Lahu, Dai, Hezhen, Miaozu, Naxi, Oroqen, She, Tu, Tujia, Naxi, Xibo, and Yakut], HapMap [ Han Chinese (CHB) and Japanese (JPT)], and East Asian or East Asian American subjects of Vietnamese, Korean, Filipino and Chinese ancestry. Paired Fst (Wei and Cockerham) showed* close relationships between CHB and several large East Asian population groups (CHB/Korean, 0.0019; CHB/JPT, 00651; CHB/Vietnamese, 0.0065) with larger separation with Filipino (CHB/Filipino, 0.014).* Low levels of differentiation were also observed between Dai and Vietnamese (0.0045) and between Vietnamese and Cambodian (0.0062). *Similarly, small Fst's were observed among different presumed Han Chinese populations originating in different regions of mainland of China and Taiwan (Fst's <0.0025 with CHB).* For PCA, the first two PC's showed a pattern of relationships that closely followed the geographic distribution of the different East Asian populations. PCA showed substructure both between different East Asian groups and within the Han Chinese population. These studies have also identified a subset of East Asian substructure ancestry informative markers (EASTASAIMS) that may be useful for future complex genetic disease association studies in reducing type 1 errors and in identifying homogeneous groups that may increase the power of such studies."
*http://journals.plos.org/plosone/art...l.pone.0003862*

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## bicicleur

Han formation happened ca 3 ka.
5.5 ka first farmers from China arrived in Korea. Haplo N or O ?
Japan was inhabited from LGM by the Ainu HG (haplo D). During iron ages the Yayoi entered Japan with 'wet' rice culture (paddy fields).
It is not known if Yayoi came from China or Korea.
Both Japan and Korea have abt 65 % haplo O, split between O2-M122 and O1b2-P49.
O1b2-P49 is almost exclusive Japanese, Korean and Manchrian.
Japan has still a big component (35 %) of Ainu - haplo D.

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## johen

> How genetically close are Koreans and Japanese to Han and to each other ?


Here is: Chinese samples were all *north Chinese; Beijing and Manchurian*.


As a gene expert, you can know where the yayoi originated in without Razib Khan' comment.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gn.../#.V9cOB_krKUm

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## johen

> Han people are believed to be originated vaguely from the area of the Yellow and Han river (Longshan culture) and who later became loyal to the emperors.


I think they came from far southern area, like Daxi in the map





> They colonised all China as the emperor conquered more territories.
> These people are *mainly O2* and a lot of them O2-M134.
> But before the Han emperors, also the area around the Yangzi delta (Shangai area) became incorporated in the empire.
> These people were mainly O1a-M119, the forfathers of the speakers of Austronesian languages (pacific Ocean).


why O2, not 03? Longshan is mainly O3.

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## bicicleur

> I think they came from far southern area, like Daxi in the map


this anciant Daxi DNA

Daxi
Yangzi China
Daxi


4400-3300 BC


1 * O1b1a1a-M95 + 1 * O2-M122 + 5 * O2a2a1a2-M7


Yangtze river 2007



O2-M7 is rare today and more present among Hmong-Mien, not Han

earliest Longshan was near the confluence of the Wei river into the Yellow river




> why O2, not 03? Longshan is mainly O3.


ISSOG name has changed, O3 does not exist any more

I'm talking about O2-M122

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## bicicleur

> Here is: Chinese samples were all *north Chinese; Beijing and Manchurian*.
> 
> 
> As a gene expert, you can know where the yayoi originated in without Razib Khan' comment.
> http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gn.../#.V9cOB_krKUm


China in the center, that is logical.
Except for Mongalians, all these people descend in large part from the Chinese neolithic.
Expansion northbound started 5.5 ka, southbound 4 ka.

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## johen

> China in the center, that is logical.
> Except for Mongalians, all these people descend in large part from the Chinese neolithic.
> Expansion northbound started 5.5 ka, southbound 4 ka.


I just kept the following map, but too lazy to find the original research paper. Modern Korean is close to Yayoi and kofun, locating in the middle of modern chinese people and japanese. 



and another chinese scholar work(2011): best match

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## Angela

I believe this upcoming paper is pertinent to the discussion:

_Reconstructing population history in East Asia 
Chuan-Chao Wang1 ,3, Nadin Rohland1, Shop Mallick1, Longli Kang6, Shi Yan2, Rukesh Shrestha2, Shaoqing Wen2, Oleg Balanovsky5, Elena Balanovska5, Yuri Bogunov5, Qiongying Deng7, Hongbing Yao8, Kumarasamy Thangaraj10, Lalji Singh10, Rong Lin9, Wangwei Cai9, Dongna Li9, Ling-Xiang Wang2, Manfei Zhang2, Lan-Hai Wei2, Alexander Kim1, Pontus Skoglund1, Iosif Lazaridis1, Iain Mathieson1, Stephan Schiffels3, Wolfgang Haak3, Chris Stringer11, Nick Patterson1, Li Jin2, Alexander N Popov4, Hui Li2, Johannes Krause3, David Reich1

"The deep population history of East Asia remains poorly understood compared to that of West Eurasia, due to the lack of ancient DNA data as well as limited sampling of present-day populations especially on the Tibetan Plateau and in southern China. We report a fine scale survey of East Asian history based on genome-wide data from ancient samples in the Amur River Basin, as well as 435 newly reported individuals from 53 populations. Present-day groups can be broadly classified into highly differentiated clusters, corresponding to Amur River Basin, Tibetan Plateau, southern natives and Han Chinese. Populations of the Amur River Basin show a high degree of genetic continuity from seven thousand years ago until today, and are closely related to the strain of East Asian related ancestry present in Native Americans. Tibetan Plateau populations are all admixed, deriving about 5%-10% of their ancestry from an anciently divergent population that plausibly corresponds to the Paleolithic population on the Plateau, and the remaining part from an ancient population that no longer exists in unmixed form but that likely corresponds to expanding farmers from the Middle and Upper Yellow River Basin who also contributed 40-90% of the ancestry of Han Chinese. A total of 10-60% of Han Chinese ancestry derives from southern Native populations, and we show that the type of southern Native ancestry that contributed to Taiwan Island Austronesian speakers is most closely related to present-day speakers of Tai-Kadai languages in southern mainland China."

_To answer the original question wouldn't we have to know the proportion that the Han represent of the total population of the modern nation state of China?

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## Zionas

*I would say China. On Chinese anthropology forums such as ranhaer and WeGene I've seen members with Y-HG R1a and N, which are Indo-European and Siberian in origin. One guy on WeGene has mt-HG H6a, which is Central Asian / Middle Eastern. Although most people don't think of China as a melting pot, the Han have assimilated many other ethnic groups for thousands of years. I am 3/4 southwestern Chinese (Chongqing), which gives me some Baiyue admixture. I'm also 1/4 northwestern (Xi'an). 

I tested 23andme a long time ago, don't remember my exact results but they were approximately something like this:
96.9% Chinese
0.5% Korean
0.6% SE Asian
1.0% Broadly EA
0.3% Broadly EA and NA

0.5% European
0.1% East European
Less than 0.1% Broadly Southern European
0.4% Broadly European

0.1% South Asian

Less than 0.1% Central and South African

0.1% Unassigned


What do you guys think? Is the European / South Asian / African due to recent colonialism and foreign aggression in China? Would a percentage of say .5% be considered significant?
*

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## Zionas

*​I'm O2a2b and M7b1a1b.*

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## rasa.sayange36

What if we exclude non-Han ethnic groups, since Uyghur population is obviously admixed.

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## Angela

The Genetics of China: The Han and Beyond

https://blog.insito.me/the-insight-s...d-7ec67e0454ff

The blog post contains links to two genetics papers.

As I had argued, the Chinese are remarkably homogeneous genetically.

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## ihype02

Interesting.

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## daming

There is research showing East asian are more homogeneous than european 

By 

Genetic distance map by Magalhães et al. (2012)

I can't post link but u can search and find a genetic map which show genetic homogeneity

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