Posted on 04/02/2016 10:27:34 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
The first largescale study of ancient DNA from early American people has confirmed the devastating impact of European colonisation on the Indigenous American populations of the time.
Led by the University of Adelaide's Australian Centre for Ancient DNA (ACAD), the researchers have reconstructed a genetic history of Indigenous American populations by looking directly into the DNA of 92 pre-Columbian mummies and skeletons, between 500 and 8600 years old.
Published today in Science Advances, the study reveals a striking absence of the pre-Columbian genetic lineages in modern Indigenous Americans; showing extinction of these lineages with the arrival of the Spaniards.
"Surprisingly, none of the genetic lineages we found in almost 100 ancient humans were present, or showed evidence of descendants, in today's Indigenous populations," says joint lead author Dr Bastien Llamas, Senior Research Associate with ACAD. "This separation appears to have been established as early as 9000 years ago and was completely unexpected, so we examined many demographic scenarios to try and explain the pattern."
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The ancient genetic signals also provide a more precise timing of the first people entering the Americas--via the Beringian land bridge that connected Asia and the north-western tip of North America during the last Ice Age.
"Our genetic reconstruction confirms that the first Americans entered around 16,000 years ago via the Pacific coast, skirting around the massive ice sheets that blocked an inland corridor route which only opened much later," says Professor Alan Cooper, Director of ACAD. "They spread southward remarkably swiftly, reaching southern Chile by 14,600 years ago."
(Excerpt) Read more at eurekalert.org ...
My pleasure.
My pleasure!
The girl in your post #1, I don’t see any braided hair. She doesn’t look like a mummy.
She’s mummified, and I’ve got bad eyes — the braids are there, however.
Yes, as much as 4%. The article outlined a process where the oldest inhabitants lived in isolated groups, with their Dan appearing in modern dna in small percentages.
Remarkable, isn’t it, that despite the constant, basically continuous volcanism for billions of years, that such an event has never been observed, anywhere?
The percentage has to do with random loss of half of parental DNA with each generation, as well as, in part, the vanishingly small surviving samples of Neandertal DNA.
A very rare event, like the Yellowstone blasts that (appear to) happen every 600,000 or so years. We’ve never seen them, but the evidence points to them.
No evidence points to them, there just happens to be a volcano cookin’ somewhere all the time. The same thinking led to impact craters on Earth being labeled “cryptovolcanic”, and the lunar surface — which is covered with impact craters — being attributed to volcanism.
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