Are Papuans more related to Indians/South-Asians.... or more to Southeast Asians?

[theplayer]

East eurasians branch off into northern (east asian) and southern (australoid). These two are very distantly related to each other and not close at all. Indians have direct contribution from the southern (australoid). And if you look at any pca you can see papuans/melanesians form a point at the bottom away from east asians, and indians are on a cline directly toward them. So there is a real, direct connection

Also I don't think Onge/Hoabinhian/Australasians/AASI(or well, where the cline leads to) plotting close together necessarily means they are closely related.
I would guess it has more to do with genetic drift and a bottleneck of East Asians(including Native Americans, who later had a big bottleneck of their own):

1. Tianyuan, which is closer to East Asians than to Onge, also plots right between Papuans and Onge, probably since he lived before this bottleneck in East Asians.
2. Africans with no eurasian admixture all bunch up in one corner of a global PCA, despite some being very divergent, showing that a global PCA is dominated by genetic drift.

So all of these southern ENA groups doesn't have to form a clade with respect to East Asians, it could just be that East Asians "recently"(probably still 30kya or something) had a bottleneck and that explains why Tianyuan/Hoabinhian/Onge/Papuan/Australian/"Simulated-AASI" etc all plot together

But again someone please correct me if I am wrong, which I absolutely could be.

[witness]

pop1 pop2 pop3 pop4 est se z p.value
1 Mbu Pap Iru Cam 0.0033 0.00041 7.91 2.5246e-15
2 Mbu Pap Iru Han 0.0035 0.0004 8.75 < 2.22e-16
3 Mbu Pap Iru ONG 0.0045 0.00043 10.43 < 2.22e-16

Papuans are more related to even Han than some of the most AASI South Indians which isn't surprising since both East Asians and Papuans are >95% East Eurasian/ENA while Irula has significant West Eurasian ancestry as well.


pop1 pop2 pop3 pop4 est se z p.value
1 Mbu ONG Pap Han 0.0022 0.00045 4.84 1.3013e-06
2 Mbu Pap ONG Han -0.00094 0.00042 -2.26 0.023698


I don't see any reason to believe that AASI/Onge/Australasian populations all come from one clade to the exclusion of East Asians?
I think there must be some more complex history of admixture especially when you also add ancient populations like Tianyuan.
See for example the Hoabinhian paper(https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/278374v1.full) where East Asians are modelled as a mixture of something related to Onge(3/4) and something related to Tianyuan(1/4).
IIRC I've also seen the proportions reversed(IE East Asian being mostly Tianyuan-like).

Unfortunately we don't have any AASI-samples but my guess would be that they were a mix of Onge/Hoabinhian-related and something "even more indigenous" probably with lots of substructure as well over the Indian subcontinent.
But perhaps someone with more knowledge could correct me.

Perhaps it is Denisovan admixture or even other local ancient Hominids around the area?

[parasar]

[Wes345]

More to Southeast Asians.