Fu Qiaomei's team reports the first well-contextualized genomes from 11,000–9,000-year-old Donghulin remains: a previously unknown deep northern East Asian lineage in the lower layer, and population turnover by the upper layer.
A popular-science tour of the Austronesian expansion: how the mtDNA "Polynesian motif" and O-lineage Y chromosomes trace ancient voyagers, and why Palau mixed before arrival while Vanuatu mixed afterward.
Ancient genomes from 21 Palauan individuals show the island's first settlers already carried a roughly 60:40 East Asian–Papuan mixture, pushing the key admixture event back to before the island was even reached.
Integrating 1,507 high-coverage Y sequences, 780 ancient East Asian genomes, and 1,748 Southeast Asian sequences, the study identifies at least five Neolithic southward farmer waves carried mainly by O1 and O2 lineages.
Pooling mitogenomes from 17 Jomon sites, a University of Tokyo study reframes east-west Jomon differences as environmentally driven insular divergence after one settlement, rather than evidence of multiple sea crossings.
A University of Tokyo team pooling whole mitogenomes from 17 Jomon sites argues east-west differences arose from insular divergence after a single settlement, not from multiple migration routes.
A preprint on ancient genomes from Ladakh traces three millennia of dynamic admixture between Tibetan-related, South Asian, and Central Asian ancestry, with Tibetan-related roots integrated for at least 1,500 years.
Eleven individuals from two Late Bronze-Age co-burials at Dongshantou, Jilin, all share Y-haplogroup C2b while mtDNA varies—evidence of a single patriline and female exogamy.
Twenty-eight Han-Dynasty genomes from Shandong support a model in which demic diffusion of Central-Plain Longshan populations, layered with regional interaction, drove the genetic formation of Han Chinese.