Early male and female footprints of modern humans across Eurasia and Australasia.

Abstract

As an alternative to a recent coastal southern route followed by modern humans to colonize Eurasia after an Out of Africa around 60 Kya, and under the premise that the evolutionary rate based coalescent ages slowdown going backwards in time, I propose a new model based on phylogenetic and phylogeographic analyses of uniparental markers in present and past modern human populations across Eurasia and Australasia.

The archaeological record favors a northern route that reached China around 120 kya and then descended latitudinally reaching Southeast Asia and islands around 70-60 kya. These ages coincide with the basal split of the mtDNA macrohaplogroup L3’4* and the origin of the Y- chromosome macrohaplogroup CT* and the subsequent splits in Eurasia of mtDNA haplogroups M and N and Y-chromosome C, D and F clades respectively.

Roughly at the same time modern humans arrived in Australasia other groups retreated southwest returning to Africa carrying with them mtDNA L3 and Y-Chromosome E lineages. Southeast Asia and Southwest-Central Asia were the subsequent demographic centers for the respective colonization of East and northern Asia and Europe. Across the Ganges-Brahmaputra and the Indus valleys, South Asia was colonized from both migratory centers.