Native Americans Descended From a Single Ancestral Group, DNA Study Confirms

UC Davis ^ | April 28, 2009 | Kari Schroeder and Liese Greensfelder

[Pharmboy]

How does this reconcile with the language evidence seemingly proving separate migrations? Need balm to weigh in here, and any other American Indian ethnographers on FR...

[US Navy Vet]

In the Beginning G*D...!

[Pharmboy]

American Indian/Bering Strait/DNA ping...

[Man50D]

I’m a native American. I was born and raised in this country.

[Pharmboy]

blam...forgive me the typo in #1 above...”balm” indeed!

[TheThinker]

If they didn’t come from Asia, where did they come from?

[Pharmboy]

That’s THEIR headline...check the key words.

[Pharmboy]

This does not AT ALL negate Him...it's only man's attempt to understand His work.

And thank you for your service...

[Pharmboy]

Oh...they came from Asia all right. These findings are evidence that the founding population was isolated in Asia for several thousand years before coming over the land bridge or coming by boat. Whichever...

[mnehring]

bfltr

[frithguild]

Furthermore, the fact that the allele was absent in other Asian populations most likely meant that America’s ancestral founders had been isolated from the rest of Asia for thousands of years before they moved into the New World: that is, for a period of time that was long enough to allow the allele to originate in, and spread throughout, the isolated population.

This "wellspring" population may have supported several migrations over these thousands of years?

[muawiyah]

The strength of the study depends on the samples ~ 908 people in 44 identifiable groups.

Simply looking at languages in the Americas they are short SEVERAL HUNDRED GROUPS.

When you get back to the initial purpose of this sample it was simply to demonstrate that folks from Eastern Siberia could populate both North and South America with a single founding population.

The first problem with this study (which isn't exactly news) is that it does not deal with the previous discovery that North American Indians, but not South American Indians, share a unique DNA sequence with Sa'ami in Scandinavia and Berbers in North Africa.

I will credit them with using some "weasel words" in this report ~ e.g. "most likely" ~ so I suppose that's progress.

At the same time there's archaeological evidence that MORE THAN ONE population arrived on the West Coast ~ we got their bones!

[Pharmboy]

Thanks for commenting...and a question: this does not negate additional population admixing. It seems to show a foundation population, but does not say anything about subsequent migrations. Is that right?

[brytlea]

Interesting article, thanks for posting. I wonder how they would have been isolated?

[squarebarb]

I lived and worked for ten years in northern Canada among both Inuit and Native people, and it seems to me the Inuit and the Cree/Athapaskan people looked very different. Their cultures were very different indeed. What do you think?

Also I have read that the Algonkian peoples have a high incidence of the genome X as opposed to other groups in North American.

This is from Oppenheimer.

Interested in your opinion, thanks.

[WhyisaTexasgirlinPA]

My husband has been doing some personal research with the DNA studies and just said he understood some of the East Coast tribes came from Europe.

[Pharmboy]

Perhaps by migrating as a tribe to northeast asia and no one followed them. The cold could have kept them alone...

[Lucky Dog]

I’m a native American. I was born and raised in this country.

Me, too.

That does bring up an interesting discussion point, however. Should the populations discovered here and named Indian by European explorers be called something else since they are obviously not from India?

Besides the overly broad term, Native American (which, as you have noted, applies to you and me as well as the group so designated by the PC crowd), I have seen AmerInd and several others. Perhaps, they would be more correctly identified as Aboriginal Americans. What do you think?

[squarebarb]

In Beringia. The land bridge, which was not so much a bridge as a small continent, between NA and northern Siberia. Lasted for thousands of years until it was drowned by global warming ca. 12,000 (?) BC.

Oppenheimer points out that groups entering before the great Ice Age would have been pushed south by the ice caps, and then as the ice caps melted, would have re-entered the formerly ice-covered areas and repopulated them.

Somehow this article doesn’t seem right.

[ConservaTexan]

For two decades, researchers have been using a growing volume of genetic data to debate whether ancestors of Native Americans emigrated to the New World in one wave or successive waves.

'Native American' is erroneous. 'Original invader' or 'primitive settler' would be much more accurate.