MTDNA E - DNAGENICS
MTDNA E - DNAGENICS
www.dnagenics.com
Two contrasting proposals have been made for the location and time of the origin of Haplogroup E. One view is that the clade was formed over 30,000 years ago, around the time of the Last Glacial Maximum, on the northeast coast of Sundaland (near modern Borneo). In this model, the haplogroup was dispersed by rising sea levels during the Late Glacial period.
In 2014, the mitochondrial DNA of an 8,000-year-old skeleton found on Liang Island, one of the Matsu Islands off the southeast China coast, was found to belong to Haplogroup E, with two of the four mutations characteristic of the E1 subgroup. From this, Ko and colleagues argue that Haplogroup E arose 8,000 to 11,000 years ago near the north Fujian coast, travelled to Taiwan with Neolithic settlers 6,000 years ago, and from there spread to Maritime Southeast Asia with the Austronesian language dispersal. Soares et al caution against over-emphasizing a single sample, and maintain that a constant molecular clock implies the earlier date (and more southerly origin) remains more likely.