Dene-Yeniseian, Eskimo-Aleut, and Chukotko-Kamchatkan

This post is part of a draft on South Siberian language homelands and Sprachbünde.

At least three major genetic changes have been described to date involving the Lena and Kolyma regions in East Siberia, and all are probably associated with some of the archaeological and linguistic developments that led to the known Early Modern distribution of languages in the Russian Far East and in Northern America.

The following is a tentative description of such intertwined linguistic-archaeological-genetic developments, based on the few available data from each field. For this guesswork, first genetic-archeological results, and then plausible … Read the rest “Dene-Yeniseian, Eskimo-Aleut, and Chukotko-Kamchatkan”

Deep population history of North, Central and South America

Open access Reconstructing the Deep Population History of Central and South America, by Posth et al. Cell (2018).

Abstract:

We report genome-wide ancient DNA from 49 individuals forming four parallel time transects in Belize, Brazil, the Central Andes, and the Southern Cone, each dating to at least ∼9,000 years ago. The common ancestral population radiated rapidly from just one of the two early branches that contributed to Native Americans today. We document two previously unappreciated streams of gene flow between North and South America. One affected the Central Andes by ∼4,200 years ago, while the other explains an affinity

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Waves of Palaeolithic ANE ancestry driven by P subclades; new CWC-like Finnish Iron Age

New preprint The population history of northeastern Siberia since the Pleistocene, by Sikora et al. bioRxiv (2018).

Interesting excerpts (emphasis mine; most internal references removed):

ANE ancestry

The earliest, most secure archaeological evidence of human occupation of the region comes from the artefact-rich, high-latitude (~70° N) Yana RHS site dated to ~31.6 kya (…)

The Yana RHS human remains represent the earliest direct evidence of human presence in northeastern Siberia, a population we refer to as “Ancient North Siberians” (ANS). Both Yana RHS individuals were unrelated males, and belong to mitochondrial haplogroup U, predominant among ancient West Eurasian hunter-gatherers,

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Inca and Spanish Empires had a profound impact on Peruvian demography

Open access Evolutionary genomic dynamics of Peruvians before, during, and after the Inca Empire by Harris et al., PNAS (2018) 201720798 (published ahead of print).

Abstract (emphasis mine):

Native Americans from the Amazon, Andes, and coastal geographic regions of South America have a rich cultural heritage but are genetically understudied, therefore leading to gaps in our knowledge of their genomic architecture and demographic history. In this study, we sequence 150 genomes to high coverage combined with an additional 130 genotype array samples from Native American and mestizo populations in Peru. The majority of our samples possess greater than 90% Native

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Population structure in Argentina shows most European sources of South European origin

Open access Population structure in Argentina, by Muzzio et al., PLOS One (2018).

Abstract (emphasis mine):

We analyzed 391 samples from 12 Argentinian populations from the Center-West, East and North-West regions with the Illumina Human Exome Beadchip v1.0 (HumanExome-12v1-A). We did Principal Components analysis to infer patterns of populational divergence and migrations. We identified proportions and patterns of European, African and Native American ancestry and found a correlation between distance to Buenos Aires and proportion of Native American ancestry, where the highest proportion corresponds to the Northernmost populations, which is also the furthest from the Argentinian capital. Most of

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Paternal lineages mainly from migrants, maternal lineages mainly from local populations in Argentina

New paper (behind paywall) Genetic variation in populations from central Argentina based on mitochondrial and Y chromosome DNA evidence, by García, Pauro, Bailliet, Bravi & Demarchi, J. Hum. Genet (2018) 63: 493–507.

Abstract (emphasis mine):

We present new data and analysis on the genetic variation of contemporary inhabitants of central Argentina, including a total of 812 unrelated individuals from 20 populations. Our goal was to bring new elements for understanding micro-evolutionary and historical processes that generated the genetic diversity of the region, using molecular markers of uniparental inheritance (mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosome). Almost 76% of the individuals show

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