North and South, you parted ways 9,500 years ago

Who are you? Where do you come from? Where are we going? These three "ultimate questions" are not only asked by community security guards every day, but also the "holy grail" that paleoanthrologists assiduously seek.
May 15, Science magazine published a research paper online by Fu Qiaomei, a researcher at the Institute of Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. This paper solves some mysteries about the prehistoric population pattern and migration and mixing of prehistoric populations in north and south China from a genetic point of view, and fills the important information gap of prehistoric human genetics, evolution and adaptation in the East, especially in China.In recent years, many achievements have been made in the study of ancient human genetic evolution in Southeast Asia, Siberia and other places adjacent to East Asia, but so far little information about the prehistoric human genome has been known in East Asia, especially in north and south China.
history of human evolution, there can be no shortage of important chapters from China. With this idea in mind, Fu Qiaomei team, relying on advanced ancient DNA technology, successfully captured and sequenced the genomes of 25 9500-4200-year-old individuals and 1 300-year-old individuals at 11 sites in shandong, Inner Mongolia and southern Fujian in northern China, adjacent to Liangdao and Lock Harbor.
These ancient evidences provide important genetic evidence for the study of the migration and evolution history of ancient populations in East Asia, especially modern people, in the framework of large space-time, and are the first systematic paleogenomic studies of the largest time span for populations in north and south China.
They found that the population along the Yellow River basin to the grasslands of eastern Siberia, at least 9,500 years ago, carried an ancient northern population component represented by individuals from Neolithic Shandong, while Chinese mainland the people of the coastal and Taiwan Straits islands carried at least 8,400 years ago an element of the ancient southern population represented by individuals of Neolithic Fujian and its adjacent islands, and the two components were distinct.
", that is to say, as early as 9,500 years ago, China's north and south people have been divided. "However, as time went on, the differences and differentiation between north and south people began to narrow again, suggesting that there has been frequent migration and mixing between north and south people since the Neolithic era, " Fu told China Science Daily. What
is that this "interaction" between people in the north and south of China is very different from the European population. Since the emergence of agriculture about 9,000 years ago, the European population has been subjected to the Near East agricultural population and the Eurasian grassland population and other foreign groups of "blood change", the foreign population has been reconstructing the genetic information of the European population.
in China, the evolution of the population in the same period in the north and south has been basically continuous, not affected by the obvious influence of the foreign population, it seems to have been "fat water does not flow out of the field."
analysis by Fu Qiaomei, which may have something to do with China's independent origin center for rice and millet farming. "The impact of agriculture on population expansion is enormous. Agriculture does not originate in Europe itself, and when outsiders bring agriculture, it can soon expand locally, while Chinese has its own agriculture and is self-sufficient, so why not 'enjoy it'?" Researchersfound that the composition of the ancient southern population, although a smaller proportion of the population in today's East Asian continent, has a wide range of effects on populations in other regions. Archaeological materials from modern genetics and the mid-Neolithic era have hinted at the connection between the South Island language population and the people of the southern East Asian continent, but the origin of it has not been concise.
the study of the fu Qiaomei team, finally found conclusive genetic evidence. They found that the South Island-speaking population, now widely distributed in the Taiwan Strait, Southeast Asia and the southwestern Pacific islands, has a very close genetic link with the Southern Chinese coastal population of the Neolithic era.
suggests that the earliest South Island-speaking population originated in Fujian in southern China and its adjacent regions, and that this dates back explicitly to 8,400 years ago. "This is the first time we have used ancient genomic data to make it clear that china's ancient southern population more than 8,000 years ago was the ancestral source of the South Island language population." Fu Qiaomei said.
It is worth mentioning that compared with the people living in the north and west of East Asia today (such as the Daur population), the Qi and Dong people of Fujian 8,400 years ago showed more genetic ties with the people of central and southern East Asia today (such as the Han and Yi peoples), and the strongest genetic ties with the Amei and Taiya ethnic groups in Taiwan, China, reflecting the connections between the present ethnic groups.Bai Chunli, president of the , commented that the results are of great scientific value and social significance for "exploring the migration history, genetic patterns and internal integration processes of China's prehistoric population, and for identifying the ancestral origins of the South Island-speaking population, which now live mainly in Taiwan and the Pacific Islands."study by the team not only revealed the genetic link between the southern mainland population and the northern mainland population, but also confirmed the southern origins of the South Island language group. "Research provides very valuable genomic data that represents a time and region that is unprecedented and essential," the reviewer said. The
has been under preparation since 2012 and took eight years to achieve a major breakthrough. In fact, as early as 2014, she and her team had successfully obtained genomic data from several key samples from Shandong in the north and Liang Island in the southern islands, making valuable research advances on the genetic characteristics of ancient populations in the north and south of East Asia.
she always felt that she had not been persuaded. "Liang Island is an island, and as we all know, the people on the island are probably completely different from the people on the mainland." So, Fu Qiaomei led the team, began a six-year-long sample of the southern continent "battle."
However, the hot and humid climate in southern China is very detrimental to bone preservation, so sample materials from the south are not only scarce, but also microbial DNA contamination is serious, human DNA is often high or even completely degraded, which makes the relevant experiments and research more difficult. Over the past four years, they have taken 257 ancient human samples from more than 30 sites in the South, often without ancient DNA or in poor preservation conditions.
Fortunately, they have made new breakthroughs in key technologies of ancient DNA, such as the ancient DNA capture technology they developed in cooperation with their partners, which were able to "fish" extremely small amounts of human endogenutane DNA from a large amount of soil microbial DNA, successfully capturing only 0.03% of human nuclear DNA.
It is these "traces" that make Fu Qiaomei become an ancient human "gods", she peeled the silk, and finally spelled out a map of the origin of China's prehistores, and this map, also make the history of mankind more complete.