A PR release via News Wise:

Scientists Analyze First Ancient Human DNA From Southeast Asia

Results reveal three major waves of migration Released: 16-May-2018 10:35 AM EDT Source Newsroom: Harvard Medical School

In other words, a PR writeup of a paper from David Reich’s high tech graverobbing factory at Harvard.

Newswise — The first whole-genome analyses of ancient human DNA from Southeast Asia reveal that there were at least three major waves of human migration into the region over the last 50,000 years. The research, published online May 17 in Science, complements what is known from archaeological, historical and linguistic studies of Southeast Asia, defined as the area east of India and south of China. … An international team led by researchers at HMS and the University of Vienna extracted and analyzed DNA from the remains of 18 people who lived between about 4,100 and 1,700 years ago in what are now Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar and Cambodia. The team found that the first migration took place about 45,000 years ago, bringing in people who became hunter-gatherers. Then, during the Neolithic Period, around 4,500 years ago, there was a large-scale influx of people from China who introduced farming practices to Southeast Asia and mixed with the local hunter-gatherers. People today with this ancestry mix tend to speak Austroasiatic languages, leading the researchers to propose that the farmers who came from the north were early Austroasiatic speakers.

Vietnamese and Khmer in Cambodia are well-known examples of these Austroasiatic languages.

… The research revealed that subsequent waves of migration during the Bronze Age, again from China, arrived in Myanmar by about 3,000 years ago, in Vietnam by 2,000 years ago and in Thailand within the last 1,000 years. These movements introduced ancestry types that are today associated with speakers of different languages. The identification of three ancestral populations—hunter-gatherers, first farmers and Bronze Age migrants—echoes a pattern first uncovered in ancient DNA studies of Europeans, but with at least one major difference: Much of the ancestral diversity in Europe has faded over time as populations mingled, while Southeast Asian populations have retained far more variation.

One striking aspect of Europeans is how blended genetically they are, suggesting much less marital discrimination historically in Europe than in most other parts of the world. Europeans are constantly derided for discriminating against the handful of historic outlier populations in Europe, such as Jews and Gypsies, but what is unusual about Europeans is how little structure there is within their population due to old social barriers to intermarriage. Even China has many more population isolates than Europe.

The moral panic du jour is the supposed rise in “tribalism” among people of European descent. This is a particularly popular terror at the moment among pundits who are, for example, Brahmins or Members of the Tribe.

But, of course, Europeans have long been less tribal in mating patterns than just about anybody else, which might be why it can be a lucrative niche job today for elites from more tribalist peoples to get paid to berate Europeans for their purported tribalism.

“People who are nearly direct descendants of each of the three source populations are still living in the region today, including people with significant hunter-gatherer ancestry who live in Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines and the Andaman Islands,” said Reich, professor of genetics at HMS and co-senior author of the study. “Whereas in Europe, no one living today has more than a small fraction of ancestry from the European hunter-gatherers.”

Not much evidence of a steppe invader influence on southeast Asians, evidently, as there is in Europeans and South Asians. Southeast Asia is a long, long way from the steppe.