The same way they got the sweet potato. the Pacific Islands.
More bad news about how COVID has spread to South America? I don’t read articles before commenting.
There was an earlier thread about this research. There seemed to be some confusion about what it said.
First Australasian doesn’t mean this DNA is from Australia. It means there’s a group of related people who lived during the Pleistocene in an area from China to Southeast Asia and Australia. They are a different group of people than Polynesians.
Also this paper argues against a cross Pacific migration event -
“The contribution of an unsampled population to the autochthonous gene pool is thought to have led to the origin of the Australasian shared ancestry (2). In this sense, the Y population would be part of the first colonizing groups of the American continent. However, data from ancient South American samples indicated a weak Y signal around 10,000 yBP (3). This evidence indicates that, rather than a second wave entering South America from southeast Asia, the Y ancestry might be traced back to common ancestors of Native Americans, who lived in northeast Asia. “
https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/118/14/e2025739118.full.pdf
This is the face of the first known American, Lucia