Population genomic evidence of a Southeast Asian origin of Plasmodium vivax

is the most prevalent and widespread human malaria parasite, with almost three billion people living at risk of infection. With the discovery of its closest genetic relatives in African great apes (), the origin of has been proposed to be located in the sub-Saharan African area. However, the limited number of genetic markers and samples investigated questioned the robustness of this result. Here, we examined the population genomic variation of 447 human strains and 19 ape strains originating from 24 different countries across the world. We identified 2,005,455 high quality single-nucleotide polymorphism loci allowing us to conduct an extensive characterization to date of worldwide genetic variation. Phylogenetic relationships between human and ape revealed that is a sister clade of , not included within the radiation of . By investigating a variety of aspects of variation, we identified several striking geographical patterns in summary statistics as function of increasing geographic distance from Southeast Asia, suggesting that may derived from serial founder effects from a single origin located in Asia.