Gianluca Lombardo, Nicola Rambaldi Migliore, Giulia Colombo, Marco Rosario Capodiferro, Giulio Formenti, Manuela Caprioli, Elisabetta Moroni, Leonardo Caporali, Hovirag Lancioni, Simona Secomandi, Guido Roberto Gallo, Alessandra Costanzo, Andrea Romano, Maria Garofalo, Cristina Cereda, Valerio Carelli, Lauren Gillespie, Yang Liu, Yosef Kiat, Alfonso Marzal, Cosme López-Calderón, Javier Balbontín, Timothy A Mousseau, Piotr Matyjasiak, Anders Pape Møller, Ornella Semino, Roberto Ambrosini, Andrea Bonisoli Alquati, Diego Rubolini, Luca Ferretti, Alessandro Achilli, Luca Gianfranceschi, Anna Olivieri, Antonio Torroni
The barn swallow (Hirundo rustica) poses a number of fascinating scientific questions, including the taxonomic status of postulated subspecies. Here we obtained and assessed the sequence variation of 411 complete mitogenomes, mainly from the European H. r. rustica, but other subspecies as well. In almost every case, we observed subspecies-specific haplogroups, which we employed together with estimated radiation times to postulate a model for the geographical and temporal worldwide spread of the species. The female barn swallow carrying the Hirundo rustica ancestral mitogenome left Africa (or its vicinity) around 280 thousand years ago (kya), and her descendants expanded first into Eurasia and then, at least 51 kya, into the Americas, from where a relatively recent (< 20 kya) back migration to Asia took place...
May 25, 2022: Molecular Biology and Evolution