SRA

The Austronesian Expansion is one of the great geographic and demographic population expansions in human history. Over the course of thousands of years, humans originating from Taiwan spread out across the archipelagos of the Indo-Pacific. In the process, they took with them rats of the species _Rattus exulans_, which they released on the various islands to hunt as meat animals. As the historical process consisted of successive island-hopping across many generations, we hypothesize that this has left identifiable signatures in the rat's genomes. In this study, we characterize these signatures through (KASP) SNP analysis. To design primers for the SNP, we required several deep-sequenced genomes to identify biallelic-variable loci abutted by conserved regions. This submission consists of these deep-sequenced genomes, which we mapped against the high-quality reference genome of the lab rat _Rattus norvegicus_.