Pleistocene demographic histories dominate contemporary genomic diversity in a continental radiation of Himalayan–Hengduan songbirds

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume 123, Number 6, February 2026.
Significance We discover a striking variation (6.5- to 16.4-fold) in genetic diversity among 120 songbirds from the Himalayas and Hengduan, revealing that the size of ancestral Pleistocene populations—and not contemporary factors like census size, altitude distribution, or lifespan—…