Paternal heritage of the Han Chinese in Henan province (Central China): high diversity and evidence of in situ Neolithic expansions

Abstract

Background: Due to their long history, complex admixture processes and large population sizes, more research is required to explore the fine genetic structure of Han populations from different geographic locations of China.

Aim: To characterise the paternal genetic structure of the Han Chinese in Henan province, which was once the central living region of the ancient Huaxia population, the precursors of the Han Chinese.

Subjects and methods: We sequenced Y chromosomes of 60 males from Zhengzhou, Henan Province, and reconstructed a phylogenetic tree for these samples with age estimation.

Results: We observed high diversity of paternal lineages in our collection. We found that the in situ Neolithic expansion of the “Major lineages” contributed to a large portion of the paternal gene pool of the Han population in Henan Province. We also detected a large number of “Minor lineages” that diverged in the Palaeolithic Age.

Conclusion: We suggest that the high genetic diversity in the paternal gene pool of modern Han populations is mainly attributed to the reservation of a larger number of lineages that diverged in the Palaeolithic Age, while the recent expansion of limited lineages contributed to the majority of the gene pool of modern Han populations. We propose that such a structure is a basal characteristic for the genetic structure of modern Han populations.

Keywords:

• Y-chromosome
• Han Chinese
• Henan
• diversity
• Huaxia

Acknowledgements

We thank all donors for providing DNA samples and/or DNA sequences. We thank Enlighten Co., Ltd. for providing sequencing service with high data quality.

Disclosure statement

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by Henan Joint Funds of the National Natural Science Foundation of China [U1804194 to ZSZ]. L.H.W was supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [20720191047]. S.Q.W was supported by China Postdoctoral Science Foundation [191908]. The Scientific and Technology Committee of Shanghai Municipality [18490750300] and the National Natural Science Foundation of China [31900406 for LHW and 31760309 for HBY] also supported this work. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.