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Ancient DNA Reveals a Completely Unknown Population of Native Americans (sciencealert.com)
schwit1 shares the findings of a new study of 11,500-year-old bones: Sunrise girl-child ("Xach'itee'aanenh T'eede Gaay") lived some 11,500 years ago in what is now called Alaska, and her ancient DNA reveals not only the origins of Native American society, but reminds the world of a whole population of people forgotten by history millennia ago. "We didn't know this population existed," says anthropologist Ben Potter from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. "It would be difficult to overstate the importance of this newly revealed people to our understanding of how ancient populations came to inhabit the Americas." In a new study published this week, the team reports that a genetic analysis of sunrise girl-child's DNA shows she belonged to a forgotten people called the Ancient Beringians, unknown to science until now. Before now, there were only two recognized branches of early Native Americans (referred to as Northern and Southern). But when the researchers sequenced sunrise girl-child's genome -- the earliest complete genetic profile of a New World human to date -- to their surprise it matched neither.
Given the nature of this field of research -- and the scope of the new findings -- it's unlikely the new hypotheses will remain uncontested for long. But in the light of all the new evidence researchers are uncovering, it's clear the first settlers of America carried a more diverse lineage than we ever realized. "[This is] the first direct evidence of the initial founding Native American population," Potter says. "It is markedly more complex than we thought." The findings are reported in the journal Nature.
Given the nature of this field of research -- and the scope of the new findings -- it's unlikely the new hypotheses will remain uncontested for long. But in the light of all the new evidence researchers are uncovering, it's clear the first settlers of America carried a more diverse lineage than we ever realized. "[This is] the first direct evidence of the initial founding Native American population," Potter says. "It is markedly more complex than we thought." The findings are reported in the journal Nature.
Sent a DNA sample to ancestry.com for my family tree, they sent back an envelope of seeds with a note "start over".
sigh
This seems to be a solid confirmation of that third wave, but not actually a 'new' discovery.
The DNA in the two girls' remains does not show up in extant native American populations, so they are more likely to represent a dead end rather than a "wave".
So, are these what they call the Clovis or "pre-Clovis" people or are we talking way before them? We visited a Clovis site in New Mexico this summer, and they were a fascinating culture who hunted mammoths. If I remember correctly, they also died out, so are considered a "dead end".
You are welcome on my lawn.
The real question is how did they know Xach'itee'aanenh T'eede Gaay was her name? The next time you bring your pet to the veterinarian give them this as your pet's name. They will look at you a little bit differently.
How do we know they were called "the Ancient Beringians"?
#DeleteChrome
two recognized branches of early Native Americans (referred to as Northern and Southern)
North American is best American!
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
This archaeological finding trumps them ALL. https://www.theonion.com/archa...
>average coverage of approximately 17 times
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
It's probably going to turn out that there were multiple parties which got here in a variety of ways. Are you seeing all the places they're finding cultivated cannabis buried with corpses around the world way before that was supposed to have gotten around? At minimum, people were migrating with the seeds, but it's also a potential indicator of trade with the new world .
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So, are these what they call the Clovis or "pre-Clovis" people or are we talking way before them?
It is unlikely they are Clovis. The Clovis people are genetic ancestors of Native Americans, while the girls in TFA are not. Also, the Clovis people lived in Montana and New Mexico about 13 kya, while these girls lived in Alaska 11.5 kya, so they likely arrived from Siberia after the Clovis migration.
She is from a group that came to the area she was found 5-15,000 years before she lived.
She is related to modern groups, but from before they split. She is definitely pre-Clovis from a genetic perspective. It shows that Clovis people did not likely supersede the people in Central Beringia, but developed after having migrated out.
Also, perhaps the second wave passed through Beringia as travelers or refuges, not as conquerors, since they had large numbers but didn't displace the early wave. So not only did the "pause" happen, but the pause culture was likely very strong and outlasted the second migration, perhaps lasted until the local conditions changed. The first wave left Siberia ~10k years before they expanded down into North America from Beringia, and the second wave came through not that long after first came down. So there is overlap between all these groups.
So, are these what they call the Clovis or "pre-Clovis" people or are we talking way before them? We visited a Clovis site in New Mexico this summer, and they were a fascinating culture who hunted mammoths. If I remember correctly, they also died out, so are considered a "dead end".
Judging by the date these are a hitherto unknown group of 'Clovis' people but Clovis is more of a cultural and temporal designation than a genetic one. Clovis (oversimplifying here) is currently a label that is stuck on any group inhabiting the Americas between ~15.000-11.000 years ago and that used a particular style of cultural artefacts and (mostly) their stone tools (because stone tools and garbage piles is usually all we ever find). Thus Clovis is a cultural grouping that does not map directly to a distinct genetic population any more than all modern humans who use claw hammers, wrenches, files, soldering irons, ... etc belong to the same genetically distinct population since humans readily adopt new cultures and abandon old ones if they see an advantage in it. Walk the streets of Tokyo or Shanghai, and you won't see many people in Edo or Qing dynasty period clothes. The locals have all abandoned their traditional clothing culture for European/American style clothing culture for the most part while we here in America/Europe have supplemented much of our food culture with Oriental food culture.
The majority of the early Native Americans were of Asian descent while a smaller group among them may have come from a population in Siberia with some genetic affinity to populations that settled Europe but that population has died out in Asia and was swamped by later immigration waves in Europe. If I'm understanding this correctly the early settlers of N-America split into two populations with one group staying in Beringia while the rest migrated into N-America where that group then split once again into the distinct northern and southern branches of Native-Americans. The Beringians were then later swamped or absorbed by immigration waves coming back up into Canada and Alaska from the south out of North America. What is interesting about these results is firstly that they indicate a single settlement wave that gave rise to all modern Native American populations and that the DNA seems to indicate immigration into the northern most parts of North America began over 20.000 years ago. This can either mean those people were pre-Clovis if they used that tool culture or alternatively that Clovis can be pushed back to over 20.000 years ago just like 'Ötsi' the ice mummy found in the Alps some years ago pushed back the beginning of the copper age in Europe by about a thousand years.
The Beringians were then later swamped or absorbed by immigration waves coming back up into Canada and Alaska from the south out of North America.
So . . . can we build a time machine, and travel back to that time and build a great big wall, to keep out the illegal immigrants?
Then the Beringians will not get swamped and their descendants will be living next door to us, ready for some pleasant chat about hunting seals and walrus.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Genocided by those currently called the 'Native Americans,' who also wiped out whole major species in the Americas, including hunting to extinction the horses on N. America without figuring out how to ride them.
Native American oral history states that they have always resided in the Amercias. They didn't come from somewhere else. Your science can't trump history.
This has intrigued me for years. Can some explain or point me to a reference that explains the following.
It's widely believed Americas was settled by people's crossing the Bering Straights and migrating out. If that is the case then why are the seemingly more advanced/developed civilizations located in central or south America. It seems counter intuitive that the further away regions are more developed.
Those DNA-testing companies sell more con than science.
That’s what Inside Edition discovered when they had a set of triplets send their saliva to Ancestry.com and 23andMe for DNA testing. Although the triplets all came from the same womb, they got wildly different results from both companies. The DNA test results had the triplets differing from each other by more than 10%, which is a greater difference than the 7% genetic difference between humans and monkeys, the 3.1% difference in DNA between humans and orangutans, and the 1.2% difference between humans and chimps. (See “Animals That Share Human DNA Sequences“)
Indeed, genetics experts say the DNA-testing companies prey on gullible people by pinpointing your biological origins on a map with spurious specificity:
Anthropologist Deborah Bolnick of the University of Texas at Austin calls “fraudulent” companies that claim DNA testing will tell you where you came from.
Anthropologist Jonathan Marks of the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, says that instead of tracing our genetic past, what we get is a scientific scam: “It sure looks like science. Well, it is science. It’s done by scientists, and it’s done on DNA samples. And it produces real data.” But these companies simply don’t have enough comparative information to pinpoint a gene on a world map.
Morgan not only confirms what the anthropologists say — that the DNA tests are not as accurate and precise as they are claimed to be — he also reveals other problems, such as test results being “tweaked” to conform with the customer’s expectations because “It pays to suck up to the people who pay you,” and test samples being contaminated because the customers sent their saliva mixed with other substances, such as food or saliva from another person.
Most egregiously, Morgan also confides that his DNA testing company has faked African ancestry for customers deemed to be racists:
“I only know of two times somebody wanted to be tested for being another ethnicity because they didn’t like that ethnicity. Both times, [they were] white people not wanting to believe they had black ancestors. []
[W]hat we did was add ‘ That way we weren’t lying, and they [the “racist’ customers] would both be wondering how much under a percentage point was. We always try to round to the nearest number because we sometimes hear about percentage points, but for them, we leave it open to whether it’s a one or a zero. []
[One customer] wrote to us asking what that meant, and we wrote back that it meant it was under 1 percent. And we were not saying zero. Unless they got another test, that was going to bother them. Maybe they weren’t 100 percent Caucasian [] this way it leaves it open, and they’ll always be wondering.“
Apparently it is news to people that the Irish have Semitic and North African admixture, that Slavs are a quarter Asian, and that all of Southern Europe is shot through with Mediterranean outliers.
Alternative Right.
The same group of violent, primitive Asians who later invaded most of the known world, only to have their rule collapse within two generations? No wonder people called them "savages."
Alternative Right.
" Don't forget, the U.S. is a Christian Nation" - only by force as most christian nations are some form of pagan in origin
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
If that's the case after just 1,000 years, it seems quite reasonable that many, many, more lines would have existed and died out in the preceeding 10,000 or so. Especially if you were to start factoring in the more tribal nature of communities and the increased susceptibility to famine, disease, conflict, natural disasters, and so on that results.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Apparently it is news to people that the Irish have Semitic and North African admixture
This is true even of their traditional languages. Irish is Indo-European, while Semitic languages are in the unrelated Afro-Asiatic family. Yet the Celtic languages of Britain and Ireland share several key grammatical features with Semitic languages. Perhaps these features were shared alongside the mixture of genes.
Ahem. North America is Canada. The rest of you live in that place called America.
When you say "line died out" you're using an inappropriate metaphor for the evidence. Because of meiosis in each immediate descendant a random half of the genes of each of the parents are not included. When a small population is absorbed by a larger population, this can easily, over the generations, result in all unique genes not passing through, even if they all have living descendants. (Which, admittedly, is quite unlikely...but isn't addressed by the evidence.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
If North America is Canada then what's North America?
Wrong mythology:
Native tribes were created with the earth, right where they were found by the white people, living in perfect harmony with nature, numbered in hundreds of millions, enjoying medical science that has still not been matched.
According to Joseph Chang, a statistician at Yale, the figures are just 600 years for everyone currently alive in Europe
It's hard to know for sure, but looking at my own ancestry, which is traced to the 1500s, I find this number unlikely. People largely stayed in the same area for many many years. I understand (from the article) he used numerical analysis to make an estimate of how people mix, and I accept it's true if you go back farther (for example, 700s), but 600 years seems too short just based on empirical evidence.
I also have serious doubts about 3,400 years for everyone in the world......some of the populations were isolated for 10s of thousands of years (Australian aborigine, for example), and 3,400 years seems too short. If he'd said most people share an ancestor from 3,400 years ago, that would pass the "smell test," but statistically there is high probability of straggling communities who are a bit isolated.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
What they're going to find is why the Native American organizations have VOCIFEROUSLY fought any dna testing of other paleo-samples: we're going to "discover" that the Native Americans that WE refer to as original inhabitants of the New World are in fact just the last-previous swarm of people that came, kicked the shit out of whoever was there before, and wiped them out.*
*thus showing that they did the same (or worse) than the Caucasians did to them, deeply damaging their 'victimization' franchise and permanent worldwide sympathy vote.
-Styopa
That's where the geneticists come in, and this is covered in the article too. Even in *extremely* remote tribes - those in Brazil, for instance - there is genetic evidence of interbreeding with adjacent tribes, who interbreed with their adjacent tribes, and so on. Just because Tribe A has never mingled directly with true outsiders, doesn't mean their cousins in Tribe B, don't have cousins over in Tribe C that don't do so; by land for the Amazonian tribes, by sea (Polynesians, etc.) for the Aborigine. Once you start factoring in breeding by wider-ranging performers, traders, explorers, and (of course!) militaries and raiders, it starts becoming more and more likely that no one is truly isolated from everyone else for long. Obviously Chang's work is just a mathematical model and his numbers are the result of that, but it does seem to correlate very closely with genetic evidence so, while there will always be outliers, for the majority of the global population at least he's probably not all that far out of the ball park.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
I'll give you another concrete case: my parents have ancestors from similar regions in Europe, but as far back as we have records, they have no shared ancestors. What are the chances I'm an outlier? Unlikely, because of the close proximity of those two ancestor trees.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Clearly, this is proof that Jesus came to America, saved the white indians, who were wiped out by the brown people (because all the hardships are just tests by god to see if you were worthy). Praise Xenu or whatever it is they worship.
It may be related to a pre-clovis grave found in Mexico last summer.
Although the triplets all came from the same womb, they got wildly different results from both companies.
The fact is, this is normal! They are siblings and siblings often share less than 25% of their DNA with each other. Each person receives half of their autosomal DNA from their mother and half from their father. But the DNA doesn't come in "halves", it comes in little bits, a bit from here and a bit from there, so siblings definitely do not get all the same DNA.
In theory, siblings can share almost none, or almost all, of their autosomal DNA. The process is entirely random and on average, it is 25% shared (0.5 x 0.5). This is a simple problem in probability which one can't expect any journalist (let alone the average person) to understand.
As for the marketing aspects of DNA tests, well, Ancestry's marketing techniques speak for themselves. There are, however, respectable and honest DNA testing companies out there, one's with actual research scientists on staff who work closely with the genealogical community and the International Society of Genetic Genealogy (isogg.org). Check it out. (Disclaimer -- I have been testing my own and others' DNA since 2007, though never with Ancestry. Can't recommend them at all.)
Seriously? They thought they had it all worked out and then this?
Fortunately the climate scientists are much better and _they_ have everything figured out.
Yeah trollish. But the point is this: there is still a boatload of stuff that remains unknown. Assuming in any scientific discipline that 'we've pretty much got it all figured out' should be interpreted as a sign that they don't.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Oh for fucks sake. Did you actually read the fucking paper? That was a name given to the body by the present-day occupants. They could just as well have called it "Joe Bloggs", "Jane Doe", or "Harley Featherstonehaugh pronounced Fish, the Twenty Third".
If that' the most substantial comment you can come up with, then it was a bit of a waste of effort, wasn't it?
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
That was a name given to the body by the present-day occupants
No shit.
That was my point.