East-Asians mostly unchanged for 7,700 years, study suggests

In a first DNA study done by scientists of East Asian people concluded, that their genetic make-up has remained for the most part unchanged, verily akin to their ancient ancestors. All owing to the discovery of human bones found some 40 years ago by the Soviets, which were the 7,700 year-old remains of two women reportedly in their 20s and 50s respectively inside a cave in the Amur Basin, a region bordering Russia and Northern China.

Also revealing vital information about origins of agriculture and how populations migrated or stayed put.

Now, a group of researchers from Russia, UK and South Korea has studied intensively the genetic data from those olden stone-age bones. The results, which were published earlier to in the journal Science Advances, tells that the DNA of those women found is approximately 65% similar to that of the Ulchi people, who reside today in the Amur Basin.

Intriguingly, they are also quite genetically similar to todays Japanese and Koreans who are even further down south. Giving clues to the workings of big Asian migrations and how there werent many of those in at least the last 7,000 years.

Lead author, Veronika Siska,a zoology researcher at the University of Cambridge says, moving around and spreading ideas is one way innovation can happen. That is exactly the case with Europe, as modern Europeans are a 20-60 percent genetic match to their ancient counterparts.

As other researches, also suggest that farming came to Europe when hunter-gatherers brought it from the Near East, or places like modern-day Turkey and Egypt.

Not so with Asians. The genetic match between modern and ancient Asians suggests that the Asian ancestors stayed put. (Its possible that they didnt move around more because East Asia is so big and has such a varied geography.) That could mean that farming, for example, developed there independently of how it developed in other places in the world. This [paper] increases our knowledge of what happened in Asia and contrary to what happens in Europe, the switch to farming was not accompanied by population movement, concludes Federico Sanchez Quinto, an archaeologist from Uppsala University in Sweden, who according to foreign media was not a part of the study.