One of the most widespread events of the mixing of populations around the world detected by a team led by Simon Myers of Oxford University is the injection of Mongol ancestry into populations within the Mongol empire, such as the Hazara of Afghanistan and the Uighur Turks of Central Asia.
The event occurred more than 20 generations ago, according to genetic dating, which corresponds to the beginning of the 14th century, fitting well with the period of the Mongol empire.
In another example, the European colonisation of America is recorded in the genomes of the Maya and Pima Indians. And Cambodian genomes mark the fall of the Khmer empire in the form of ancestral DNA from the invading Tai people.
Myers and his colleagues — Garrett Hellenthal of University College London and Daniel Falush of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany — have detected European ancestry that entered the Tu people of central China between the 11th and 14th centuries; this, they surmise, could be from traders travelling the Silk Road.
They find among northern Italians an insertion of Middle Eastern DNA that occurred between 776BC and AD550, and may represent the Etruscans, a mysterious people said by the ancient Greek historian Herodotus to have emigrated from Lydia in Turkey.
— New York Time News Service
