Bhandari Sushil, Zhang Xiaoming, Cui Chaoying, Liao Shiyu, Peng Yi, Zhang Hui, Xiang Kun, Shi Hong, Liu Shimin, Wu Tianyi, Qi Xuebin, Su Bing
State Key Laboratory of Genetic Resources and Evolution, Kunming Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Kunming 650223, China.
Kunming College of Life Science, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China.
Sci Rep. 2015 Nov 5;5:16249. doi: 10.1038/srep16249.
Sherpas living around the Himalayas are renowned as high-altitude mountain climbers but when and where the Sherpa people originated from remains contentious. In this study, we collected DNA samples from 582 Sherpas living in Nepal and Tibet Autonomous Region of China to study the genetic diversity of both their maternal (mitochondrial DNA) and paternal (Y chromosome) lineages. Analysis showed that Sherpas share most of their paternal and maternal lineages with indigenous Tibetans, representing a recently derived sub-lineage. The estimated ages of two Sherpa-specific mtDNA sub-haplogroups (C4a3b1 and A15c1) indicate a shallow genetic divergence between Sherpas and Tibetans less than 1,500 years ago. These findings reject the previous theory that Sherpa and Han Chinese served as dual ancestral populations of Tibetans, and conversely suggest that Tibetans are the ancestral populations of the Sherpas, whose adaptive traits for high altitude were recently inherited from their ancestors in Tibet.
生活在喜马拉雅山脉周边的夏尔巴人以高海拔登山者而闻名，但夏尔巴人的起源时间和地点仍存在争议。在这项研究中，我们从生活在尼泊尔和中国西藏自治区的582名夏尔巴人那里收集了DNA样本，以研究他们母系（线粒体DNA）和父系（Y染色体）谱系的遗传多样性。分析表明，夏尔巴人的父系和母系谱系大多与藏族原住民相同，代表了一个最近衍生出来的亚谱系。两个夏尔巴人特有的线粒体DNA亚单倍群（C4a3b1和A15c1）的估计年代表明，夏尔巴人和藏族人之间的遗传分化时间不到1500年前。这些发现驳斥了之前认为夏尔巴人和汉族是藏族双重祖先群体的理论，相反表明藏族是夏尔巴人的祖先群体，夏尔巴人对高海拔的适应性特征是最近从他们在西藏的祖先那里继承而来的。
