"Hast du sehen in deine leben? Dey're darker than us! Woof!"
Posted on 03/13/2008 2:04:39 PM PDT by blam
Indian DNA links to 6 'founding mothers'
By MALCOLM RITTER, AP Science Writer
NEW YORK - Nearly all of today's Native Americans in North, Central and South America can trace part of their ancestry to six women whose descendants immigrated around 20,000 years ago, a DNA study suggests.
Those women left a particular DNA legacy that persists to today in about 95 percent of Native Americans, researchers said.
The finding does not mean that only these six women gave rise to the migrants who crossed into North America from Asia in the initial populating of the continent, said study co-author Ugo Perego.
The women lived between 18,000 and 21,000 years ago, though not necessarily at exactly the same time, he said.
The work was published this week by the journal PLoS One. Perego is from the Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation in Salt Lake City and the University of Pavia in Italy.
The work confirms previous indications of the six maternal lineages, he said. But an expert unconnected with the study said the findings left some questions unanswered.
Perego and his colleagues traced the history of a particular kind of DNA that represents just a tiny fraction of the human genetic material, and reflects only a piece of a person's ancestry.
This DNA is found in the mitochondria, the power plants of cells. Unlike the DNA found in the nucleus, mitochondrial DNA is passed along only by the mother. So it follows a lineage that connects a person to his or her mother, then the mother's mother, and so on.
The researchers created a "family tree" that traces the different mitochondrial DNA lineages found in today's Native Americans. By noting mutations in each branch and applying a formula for how often such mutations arise, they calculated how old each branch was. That indicated when each branch arose in a single woman.
The six "founding mothers" apparently did not live in Asia because the DNA signatures they left behind aren't found there, Perego said. They probably lived in Beringia, the now-submerged land bridge that stetched to North America, he said.
Connie Mulligan of the University of Florida, an anthropolgist who studies the colonization of the Americas but didn't participate in the new work, said it's not surprising to trace the mitochondrial DNA to six women. "It's an OK number to start with right now," but further work may change it slightly, she said.
That finding doesn't answer the bigger questions of where those women lived, or of how many people left Beringia to colonize the Americas, she said Thursday.
The estimate for when the women lived is open to question because it's not clear whether the researchers properly accounted for differing mutation rates in mitochondrial DNA, she said. Further work could change the estimate, "possibly dramatically," she said.
GGG Ping.
They could probably narrow it down to a single founding father...
How does that line go.... KKKKKAAAAAHHHHHHNNNNNNNNN
Has any one ever done sea bed studies to see if that area actually connected despite the common sense view that it probably was....seems to me they could do some core studies to see if they could find human artifacts from about that era before the seas submerged that area.
But...but...I thought they were Native Americans, you mean they weren't from here originally?
I thought they were Hebrew....LOL
Phoenician women?
"Hast du sehen in deine leben? Dey're darker than us! Woof!"
This is interesting because my Wife insist Native Americans did NOT come from Asia and may well have been here all along.
A show on the History channel (Making of 10,000 BC) suggested 2 or more groups came here 13,500 years ago. One from Europe and another from Asia.
It’s just a easy for me to believe some groups may have come from the south.
But....but.....but, I heard tell they were one of the lost tribes of the Israelites.
I think you are right. I believe some Polynesians made it to South American and came north, making three ports of entry.
More would have arrived if they came by a land bridge, IMHO.
More would have arrived if they came by a land bridge, IMHO.
The land bridge still seems to have been the source for most migration. There were one or more coastal migrations, but they seem to have been small, and didn't result in much spread to the interior.
Here is a good recent article: Beringian Standstill and Spread of Native American Founders.
BTW: My Wife and I have NA blood and many NA friends but, none of us are very PC.
YEC INTREP
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