This project aims to study the East Timor population with two sets of autosomal SNPs. One is formed by 52 loci and is useful for identification in different populations. It comprises a set of valuable markers for human identification complemented with highly polymorphic markers in Caucasian, Asian and African populations. The other set allows the simultaneous study of 34 markers chosen to define ancestry, including the results in one of three populations: Sub-Saharan African, European and East Asian.

The choice of the East Timor population is based on three facts: 1) the samples are already available for this study; 2) this is a population whose location is believed to have been central in the human migration and colonization routes of the ancestral continent of Sahul during the Pleistocene, a idea supported by traces of modern human occupation of the island from approximately 40.000BP (before present); 3) there is a lack in the information available on the population of Oceania.

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