Thread by @blog_supplement

Some notes concerning the recent report of a pre-Neolithic young forager woman from Leang Panninge, South Sulawesi. Unfortunately, due to magazine fever many molecular paleoanthropology papers while presenting important specimens are shitilly written&illustrated. So we have to

wade through some of that to get points of interest:
1. The ancestral Asian split up into several far ranging groups by at least 50ky: i. The Tianyuan man-like Eastern group. ii Onge-Hòabìnhian group extending from at least at least the Andamans through Laos, Vietnam& Malayasia

iii. An early-diverging sister group of the Onge-Hòabìnhian clade were the hunter-gatherers of the Indian subcontinent from whom Indians on an average get a major fraction of our ancestry. iv. The Tibetan-Jomon group which once stretched over Asia from at least Nepal-Tibet to

Japan before the classical Koreanic-type east Asian invasion. v. A group probably branching close to the stem after the Tianyuan-like &Onge-like groups somehow reached America and contributed to the ancestry of some South Americans. Today other than the Indian HG-component, the

Onge-like group include the Philippines Negritos, Papuans& Australians. 2. The Onges &Hòabìnhians lack high Denisovan ancestry but the Papuans& Australians show evidence for at least two introgression events with Denisovans. The Philippines Negritos too had 1 or 2 Denisovan

admixtures. Thus, Onge-like peoples spreading over South East Asia encountered Denisovan races all the way from Philippines to Sahul (Pap+Aus)& annihilated them across the Indo-Pacific islands while mating with them on occasion. On their march at some point they also reached

South America. There they were absorbed within the Americans of North Asian ancestry. 3. Here's where the Leang Panninge woman comes in. She clearly has that Onge-like ancestry of the type seen in Sahul peoples & the Denisovan admixture ~50%. However, she also has 50% East Asian

from a sister lineage of Tianyuan. The authors say this can be approximated by Qihe a southern East Asian Neolithic chap from ~8.4 KYA. This suggests that not just Onge-like groups but also this more Tianyuan like group expanded into the Pacific mixing with the former. However,

this type of ~50-50 Qihe-Onge-like mixture is no longer present in Sulawesi or its surroundings. They seemed to have been wiped out in turn by the Austronesian expansion.