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.
The Indian dude from 20,000 years ago had 6 wives?
Yes, he had six wives. Five of then had it pretty soft.
The continents have not moved appreciably during human times.
"The oldest human remains found in the Americas were recently "discovered" in the storeroom of Mexico's National Museum of Anthropology. Found in central Mexico in 1959, the five skulls were radiocarbon dated by a team of researchers from the United Kingdom and Mexico and found to be 13,000 years old. They pre-date the Clovis culture by a couple thousand years, adding to the growing evidence against the Clovis-first model for the first peopling of the Americas."
"Of additional significance is the shape of the skulls, which are described as long and narrow, very unlike those of modern Native Americans."
The continents are moving at about the same rate as your fingernails grow...very slow.
If they are unlike modern Native Americans, what group/who are they like? Surely not caucasians. =:P
Yams (sweet potatos) are native to south america. There had to be colonization at some point in order for Polynesians to have picked up sweet potatos. It isn’t quite like fruit where you plant it, watch the tree pop up, and remember the fruit. You’d need to get cuttings/roots to plant to propogate it, which would take more than a food raid on the coast to get.
It would be prohibitively expensive to take cores, and the chance of getting human artifacts from that era would be miniscule.
Great.....now I'm supposed to call them Native Beringians?
First, American Indian was replaced with Native American. African American is fashionable, despite the fact the CP in NAACP stands for Colored People. Congress still has the Black Caucus and there's still the United Negro College Fund.
How am I supposed to keep all my PC lingo straight?
Or, you could have had 20,000 females, some bad luck, and only 6 lineages surviving.
Obviously all the blue-eyed blonds died out eh~!
There’s a later migration about 5,000 BC. We know them from their languages.
The original Japanese, the Ainu people.
Not those Korean invaders we know as modern Japanese. There are still groups of them living on the Northern Islands. Ian Fleming noted their "more Caucasian" appearance and so hid Bond amongst them in "". The movie version, as usual, screwed it up and had the babe he was living with be a modern Japanese.
Old TV talk show joke:
“Somewhere in this world, a woman gives birth to a baby every 60 seconds.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have to find that woman and stop her!”
I don’t want to be racist (but since race is the subject) I have always noticed a great similarity between the looks, skin tones, hair color, and eye color between American Indians and Asians. ............ How about the ones in the Northeast, Hurons, Alagonquins, Iraquois? They used long houses, did’nt the viking have them also? It makes me wonder.
Same way I do.
By ignoring all attempts at intimidation. And keeping any race cards that come my way with the rest of the childrens' card games.
The kelp beds run all the way from Japan to South America. The Ainu people (think Kennewick Man) come from Japan.
Study Says Americas Settled 15,000 Years Ago
"The early immigrants most closely resembled the prehistoric Jomon people of Japan and their closest modern descendants, the Ainu, from the Japanese island of Hokkaido, the study said. Both the Jomon and Ainu have skull and facial characteristics more genetically similar to those of Europeans than to mainland Asians.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.