Genome of a Middle Holocene hunter-gatherer from Wallacea. 7,000 year old ancient DNA from Wallacea

Much remains unknown about the population history of early modern humans in Southeast Asia, where the archaeological record is sparse, and the tropical climate is inimical to the preservation of ancient human DNA. Here we report the first ancient human genome from Wallacea, the oceanic island zone between the Sunda Shelf (mainland Southeast Asia and the continental islands of western Indonesia) and Pleistocene Australia-New Guinea (Sahul). We extracted genetic material from the petrous bone of a young hunter-gatherer woman who was buried 7274–7078 calibrated years before present at Leang Panninge, a limestone cave in South Sulawesi, Indonesia. The individual shares most genetic drift and morphological similarities with present-day Papuan and Australian groups, yet represents a previously unknown divergent human lineage that branched off around the time of the split between Papuan and Australian populations ~37 thousand years ago5. We also describe Denisovan- and deep East Asian-related ancestries in the Leang Panninge genome and infer their large-scale displacement from the region today.