Evidence of Austronesian Genetic Lineages in East Africa and South Arabia: Complex Dispersal from Madagascar and Southeast Asia

The Austronesian dispersal across the Indonesian Ocean to Madagascar and the Comoros has been well documented, but in an unexplained anomaly, few to no traces have been found of the Austronesian expansion in East Africa or the Arabian Peninsula. To revisit this peculiarity, we surveyed the Western Indian Ocean rim populations to identify potential Austronesian genetic ancestry. We generated full mitochondrial DNA genomes and genome-wide...