Abstract
The Hmong-Mien (HM) and Sino-Tibetan (ST) speaking groups are known as hill tribes in Thailand; they were the subject of the first studies to show an impact of patrilocality vs. matrilocality on patterns of mitochondrial (mt) DNA vs. male-specific portion of the Y chromosome (MSY) variation. However, HM and ST groups have not been studied in as much detail as other Thai groups; here we report and analyze 234 partial MSY sequences (∼2.3 mB) and 416 complete mtDNA sequences from 14 populations that, when combined with our previous published data, provides the largest dataset yet for the hill tribes. We find a striking difference between Hmong and IuMien (Mien-speaking) groups: the Hmong are genetically different from both the IuMien and all other Thai groups, whereas the IuMien are genetically more similar to other linguistic groups than to the Hmong. In general, we find less of an impact of patrilocality vs. matrilocality on patterns of mtDNA vs. MSY variation than previous studies. However, there is a dramatic difference in the frequency of MSY and mtDNA lineages of Northeast Asian (NEA) origin vs. Southeast Asian (SEA) origin in HM vs. ST groups: HM groups have high frequencies of NEA MSY lineages but lower frequencies of NEA mtDNA lineages, while ST groups show the opposite. A potential explanation is that the ancestors of Thai HM groups were patrilocal, while the ancestors of Thai ST groups were matrilocal. Overall, these results attest to the impact of cultural practices on patterns of mtDNA vs. MSY variation.
Highlights
Supplementary information The online version of this article contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.Thailand occupies the center of Mainland Southeast Asia (MSEA) and shares borders with several countries: Laos and Myanmar in the North and West, Laos in the Northeast, Cambodia in the East, and Malaysia in the South (Fig. 1)
If we focus on HM or Lahu clades of the maximum clade credibility (MCC) tree of haplogroup C-F845, the age is ~2.85 kya (HPD: 4.25–1.08 kya) and ~0.58 ya (HPD: 1.55–0.29) for haplogroup F (Supplementary Fig. S2)
We focus on the HM and ST groups, we note that the previously-observed general pattern of overall genetic homogeneity of Thailand TK groups [12] continues to be maintained with these additional TK groups, consistent with the idea that the TK language family spread via demic diffusion [13]
Summary
Archaeogenetics studies indicate that modern AAspeaking groups in Southeast Asia (SEA) are descended from a dispersal of Neolithic farmers from southern China that occurred ~4000 years ago (kya) [3, 4]. Archaeological and linguistic evidence supports the presence of AA people by at least 2.5 kya, while a later expansion of the TKspeaking groups from southern China reached present-day Thailand ~2 kya [2, 5]. Historical evidence indicates that the homeland of many ST and HM speaking hill tribe groups (e.g., Akha, Lisu, Lahu, Karen, Hmong, and IuMien) is in the area further north of Thailand, i.e., northern Myanmar, northern Laos, and southern China, and most of these groups migrated to present-day Thailand ~200 ya [6, 7]. The present-day cultural and linguistic variation in Thailand has multiple sources, but the HM and ST groups have not been studied in as much detail and the impact of this variation on genetic variation is still poorly understood
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