Southeast Asian Supercluster
From Biocrawler, the free encyclopedia.
The Southeast Asian Supercluster is one of the three major genetic clusters of human populations comprising the people indigenous to Southern India, Sri Lanka, Southeast Asia, New Guinea, Micronesia, Melanesia and Australia. An earlier and more common designation for these populations is Australoid. Northern Eurasian peoples migrating south and east largely replaced them in the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia in prehistoric and historic times, while the post-Columbian colonization of Australia by Europeans largely wiped out the aborigines of Australia.
Some theories postulate that the ancestors of Southern Eurasians left Africa separate from the ancestors of Northern Eurasians, via a southern route along the Red Sea, while another theory, proposed by DNA specialist Stephen Oppenheimer, states that all non-Africans (North Africans included) are descended from a single exodus of perhaps a few hundred or even a few dozen inviduals from Africa. According to this theory, the split between Northern Eurasians and Southern Eurasians did not occur until sometime after this exodus.
