RESUMEN
Due to its unique geographical position, juxtaposed in the middle of south-central Asia, east Asia and Southeast Asia, theSouth Asian Region (SAS) has repeatedly come into contact with people from adjacent regions throughout history andprehistory. The antiquity of the populations and the intricate history of admixture have shaped SAS as one of the mostgenetically diverse regions in the world. In this article we review our current understanding of the peopling and populationsstructure of SAS. We do not attempt to be exhaustive but summarize the salient conclusions that have been reached usinggenetic data and evaluate their robustness. We also identify the unanswered questions and suggest possible approaches thatmay lead to their answers.
RESUMEN
We have compared two statistical methods of estimating the time to most recent common ancestor (TMRCA) from a sample of DNA sequences, which have been proposed by Templeton (1993) and Bandelt et al. (1995). Monte-Carlo simulations were used for generating DNA sequence data. Different evolutionary scenarios were simulated and the estimation procedures were evaluated. We have found that for both methods (i) the estimates are insensitive to demographic parameters and (ii) the standard deviations of the estimates are too high for these methods to be reliably used in practice.