Modern East Asians, unlike Europeans, very genetically similar to their ancestors

For the first time, scientists have been able to extract DNA from ancient East Asian bones and compare it to the DNA of the people there today. It turns out that modern East Asians, unlike Europeans, are very genetically similar to their ancestors….

About 40 years ago, the Soviets excavated the 7,700-year-old remains of two women…from a cave in the Amur Basin, an area near the border of Russia and northern China. Now, a team of researchers…has extracted and sequenced the genetic data from those Stone Age bones. The results…show that these women’s DNA is roughly 65 percent similar to that of the Ulchi people, who live in the Amur Basin today. Importantly, they’re also pretty genetically similar to today’s Japanese and Koreans, who live further south. That tells us that there likely weren’t any big Asian migrations in at least the last 7,000 years.

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[Unlike with Europeans, the] genetic match between modern and ancient Asians suggests that the Asian ancestors stayed put…That could mean that farming, for example, developed there independently of how it developed in other places in the world.

[The study can be found here.]

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