from the eastern Qinghai-Tibet Plateau

Published online at www.senckenberg.de/vertebrate-zoology on 4.v.2015. In this study we reconstructed the phylogenetic relationships of a narrow-range Tibetan endemic, Emberiza koslowi, to its congeners and shed some light on intraspecific lineage separation of further bunting species from Far East Asia and along the eastern margin of the Tibetan Plateau in China. The onset of the Old World bunting radiation was dated to the mid Miocene and gave rise to four major clades: i) one group comprising mainly Western Palearctic species and all high-alpine endemics of the Tibetan Plateau; ii) a clade including E. lathami, E. bruniceps and E. melanocephala; iii) one group comprising mainly Eastern Palearctic species and all insular endemics from Japan and Sakhalin; iv) an exclusively Afrotropic clade that comprised all African species except E. affinis, whose phylogenetic relationships were ambiguous and only poorly supported in all reconstructions. The Tibetan bunting, E. koslowi, turned out as an early offshoot of the Western Palearctic-Tibetan clade 1 and thus represents an ancient relic lineage that dates back to a mid Miocene colonization event of its ancestors to the alpine plateau habitats. This temporal scenario of an early Miocene origin of alpine Tibetan endemics coincides with recent result