Feb 5, 2008, 11:43 GMT
Wellington - More than half the world's total population lived in southern Asia 25,000 to 50,000 years ago, having migrated from Africa on the way to populate the rest of the world, according to New Zealand research published on Tuesday.
Today, about one-third of today's total population lives in the region, said researchers from the University of Auckland who tracked the movement of humans from their initial birthplace of Africa.
They said that by tracking mitochondrial DNA - inherited from the mother only - back through the ages to common ancestors, they had been able to plot past population size in eight major geographic regions: sub-Saharan Africa, southern Asia, north and Central Asia, Australia, Europe, Middle East and North Africa, New Guinea, and the Americas.
The research showed a slow increase in the population in Africa and a large jump in numbers in southern Asia about 50,000 years ago.
Smaller sudden increases were also identified in Australia 50,000 years ago, in Europe 45,000 and 15,000 years ago and in the Americas 20,000 years ago.
'Human mitochondrial DNA patterns reveal that we spent our adolescence, around 50,000 years ago, in Southern Asia, before spreading to other areas of the globe,' Alexei Drummond, of the university's computer science department, said.
He said research should focus more on this area if scientists wanted to understand this crucial period of human history better.
The findings were published in the latest Molecular Biology and Evolution journal.
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