http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25820898-2703,00.html
Genetic find links India to Australia Peter Wilson, Europe correspondent | July 23, 2009 Article from: The Australian GENETIC research has found links between Australian Aborigines and the earliest settlers of the Indian subcontinent, supporting the belief humans reached Australia via south Asia. The findings indicate that a group of hunter-gatherers moved from the Horn of Africa, across the mouth of the Red Sea into Arabia and southern Asia at least 50,000 years ago. The so-called "Southern Route" theory of how humans reached Australia was backed by the discovery that modern Indian populations have telltale genetic mutations exclusively shared by Aborigines. Members of 26 Indian "relic" tribes or communities known to have very early roots in the region were found to have seven DNA genomes that share traits specific to Australian Aborigines. Raghavendra Rao and other researchers from the Anthropological Survey of India carried out the research, which has been reported in the BMC Evolutionary Biology journal. "Mitochondrial DNA is inherited only from the mother and so allows us to accurately trace ancestry," he said. "We found certain mutations in the DNA sequences of the Indian tribes we sampled that are specific to Australian Aborigines. This shared ancestry suggests that the Aborigine population migrated to Australia via the so-called 'Southern Route'." The genetic evidence that modern human populations expanded rapidly along the coastlines of southern Asia, southeastern Asia and Indonesia to arrive in Australia at least 45,000 years ago is backed by archeological evidence of human occupation in the Lake Mungo area dated to roughly the same period. "Human evolution is usually understood in terms of millions of years," Dr Rao said. "This direct DNA evidence indicates that the emergence of 'anatomically modern' humans in Africa and the spread of these humans to other parts of the world happened only 50,000 or so years ago. "In this respect, populations in the Indian subcontinent harbour DNA footprints of the earliest expansion out of Africa. Understanding human evolution helps us to understand the biological and cultural expressions of these people, with far-reaching implications for human welfare."
