%0 Journal Article
%T Mitochondrial lineage M1 traces an early human backflow to Africa
%A Ana M Gonz¨˘lez
%A Jos¨¦ M Larruga
%A Khaled K Abu-Amero
%A Yufei Shi
%A Jos¨¦ Pestano
%A Vicente M Cabrera
%J BMC Genomics
%D 2007
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/1471-2164-8-223
%X The coalescence age of the African haplogroup M1 is younger than those for other M Asiatic clades. In contradiction to the hypothesis of an eastern Africa origin for modern human expansions out of Africa, the most ancestral M1 lineages have been found in Northwest Africa and in the Near East, instead of in East Africa. The M1 geographic distribution and the relative ages of its different subclades clearly correlate with those of haplogroup U6, for which an Eurasian ancestor has been demonstrated.This study provides evidence that M1, or its ancestor, had an Asiatic origin. The earliest M1 expansion into Africa occurred in northwestern instead of eastern areas; this early spread reached the Iberian Peninsula even affecting the Basques. The majority of the M1a lineages found outside and inside Africa had a more recent eastern Africa origin. Both western and eastern M1 lineages participated in the Neolithic colonization of the Sahara. The striking parallelism between subclade ages and geographic distribution of M1 and its North African U6 counterpart strongly reinforces this scenario. Finally, a relevant fraction of M1a lineages present today in the European Continent and nearby islands possibly had a Jewish instead of the commonly proposed Arab/Berber maternal ascendance.The reconstruction of human history is a multidisciplinary objective. Alternative models proposed to explain the origin and dispersion of modern humans on the basis of paleoanthropological data [1] have received uneven support from other disciplines. From a genetic perspective, uniparental non-recombining markers have depicted the most complete and coherent picture of the origin of modern humans, clearly favoring the recent out-of-Africa hypothesis. The greatest diversity and the deepest phylogenetic branches for both Y-chromosome [2,3] and mtDNA [4,5] have been found in Africa. These African lineages have coalescence ages [6-9] compatible with a recent African origin of modern humans as proposed by fo
%U http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2164/8/223