Abstract
A range-wide phylogeographic study of the common shrew Sorex araneus was performed using the concatenation of cytb and ND2 mitochondrial genes. The data support two major lineages, one of which (European haplogroup) is distributed continuously from West Europe to West Siberia; the other (Siberian haplogroup) is found in two non-adjacent areas: in central Siberia and in southern Finland and Karelia. Several smaller subclades (East European, Balkan, and West Siberian) were identified within the European lineage. Ancestral area reconstructions were performed under the maximum parsimony criterion using the algorithm that was designed to analyze landmark data. The results suggest that the last common ancestor of the common shrew inhabited the Balkans or the Danubian-Carpathian area. The results of demographic analyses are consistent with the hypothesis of recent expansion throughout the entire distribution range. The genetic diversity indices and the expansion time estimates were higher in the western part of the range. Cumulatively, these findings support the hypothesis that during the Last Glacial Maximum, the range of the common shrew was restricted to a single refugium in Southeastern Europe.
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