Y‐chromosome diversity is inversely associated with language affiliation in paired Austronesian‐ and Papuan‐speaking communities from Solomon Islands

Abstract

The Solomon Islands lie in the center of Island Melanesia, bordered to the north by the Bismarck Archipelago and to the south by Vanuatu. The nation's half-million inhabitants speak around 70 languages from two unrelated language groups: Austronesian, a language family widespread in the Pacific and closely related to languages spoken in Island Southeast Asia, and "East Papuan", generally defined as non-Austronesian and distantly related to the extremely diverse Papuan languages of New Guinea. Despite the archipelago's presumed role as a staging post for the settlement of Remote Oceania, genetic research on Solomon Island populations is sparse. We collected paired samples from two regions that have populations speaking Austronesian and Papuan languages, respectively. Here we present Y-chromosome data from these samples, the first from Solomon Islands. We detected five Y-chromosome lineages: M-M106, O-M175, K-M9*, K-M230, and the extremely rare clade, K1-M177. Y-chromosome lineages from Solomon Islands fall within the range of other Island Melanesian populations but display markedly lower haplogroup diversity. From a broad Indo-Pacific perspective, Y-chromosome lineages show partial association with the distribution of language groups: O-M175 is associated spatially with Austronesian-speaking areas, whereas M-M106 broadly correlates with the distribution of Papuan languages. However, no relationship between Y-chromosome lineages and language affiliation was observed on a small scale within Solomon Islands. This pattern may result from a sampling strategy that targeted small communities, where individual Y-chromosome lineages can be fixed or swept to extinction by genetic drift or favored paternal exogamy.

Human genetics of the Kula Ring: Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA variation in the Massim of Papua New Guinea

“…In reconstructing the demographic history of Oceania, our results not only fill an important gap between previous genetic studies on the mainland of New Guinea in the west, 9-13 the Bismarck Archipelago in the north [14][15][16] and the Solomon Islands in the east, 17,18 but also provide further insights into how human culture impacts on human genetics.…”

“…1,2 Previous studies have addressed human genetic variation in Oceania, particularly Polynesia, [3][4][5][6][7][8] mainland New Guinea [9][10][11][12][13] and Island Melanesia. [14][15][16][17][18] One area of Near Oceania (NO) yet understudied from a human genetic perspective is the island region off the southeastern tip of New Guinea (Figure 1). Administratively designated the Milne Bay Province of Papua New Guinea (PNG), this area encompasses the D'Entrecasteaux Islands (ie, Normanby, Fergusson, Dobu and Goodenough), the Trobriand Islands, the Woodlark group (ie, Gawa, Woodlark and the Laughlan Islands), the Louisiade Archipelago (ie, Misima, Sudest, Rossel and the islands of the Calvados chain), as well as a portion of the nearby PNG mainland.…”

Coevolution of languages and genes on the island of Sumba, eastern Indonesia

“…1 A) (7,9,10). These processes, which occur when migrating farmers meet resident hunter-gatherers face to face, likely characterize the expansion of Austronesian speakers into regions that were long occupied by indigenous populations in eastern Indonesia and New Guinea (7,11,12). However, most language-gene studies have sampled at a geographic scale, which is too coarse to permit any refined inference about the dynamics of language change in these contact zones.…”

Contact and phylogeny in Island Melanesia

“…It will be shown that the set of relationships shown by the linguistic structural data is plausible from a geographic perspective, and that non-phylogenetic accounts of the geographic pattern fit the data poorly. This analysis has also proved useful in the generation of testable hypotheses, particularly in the realm of human genetics (e.g., Cox and Lahr, 2006;Hunley et al, 2007).…”