The Genetic History of Native Americans

DAVID REICH; NICK PATTERSON; DESMOND CAMPBELL ; ARTI TANDON ; STEPHANE MAZIERES ; NICOLAS RAY; MARIA V. PARRA; CONSTANZA DUQUE; CLAUDIO M. BRAVI; GRACIELLA BAILLIET; MARIA-CÁTIRA BORTOLINI; FRANCISCO SALZANO; MARÍA LUIZA PETZL-ERLER; VICTOR ACUÑA-ALONZO; SAMUEL CANIZALES-QUINTEROS; CARLOS AGUILAR-SALINAS; TERESA TUSIÉ-LUNA; LAURA RIBA; MARICELA RODRÍGUEZ-CRUZ; MARDIA LOPEZ-ALARCÓN; RAMÓN CORAL-VAZQUEZ; THELMA CANTO-CETINA; JULIO MOLINA; ÁNGEL CARRACEDO; ANTONIO SALAS; CARLA GALLO; DAVID B. WITONSKY; GORKA ALKORTA-ARANBURU; REM SUKERNIK; LUDMILA OSIPOVA; SARDANA FEDOROVA; DAMIAN LABUDA; RAMIRO BARRANTES; LAURENT EXCOFFIER; GABRIEL BEDOYA; FRANCISCO ROTHHAMMER; JEAN MICHEL DUGOUJON; WILLIAM KLITZ; JUDITH KIDD; KENNETH KIDD; ANNA DI RIENZO; NELSON FREIMER; ALKES PRICE; ANDRÉS RUIZ-LINARES

NATURE

NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2012 vol. 488 p. 370 - 374

0028-0836

The peopling of the Americas has been the subject of extensive genetic, archaeological and linguistic research; however, central questions remain unresolved1, 2, 3, 4, 5. One contentious issue is whether the settlement occurred by means of a single6, 7, 8 migration or multiple streams of migration from Siberia9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15. The pattern of dispersals within the Americas is also poorly understood. To address these questions at a higher resolution than was previously possible, we assembled data from 52 Native American and 17 Siberian groups genotyped at 364,470 single nucleotide polymorphisms. Here we show that Native Americans descend from at least three streams of Asian gene flow. Most descend entirely from a single ancestral population that we call ?First American?. However, speakers of Eskimo?Aleut languages from the Arctic inherit almost half their ancestry from a second stream of Asian gene flow, and the Na-Dene-speaking Chipewyan from Canada inherit roughly one-tenth of their ancestry from a third stream. We show that the initial peopling followed a southward expansion facilitated by the coast, with sequential population splits and little gene flow after divergence, especially in South America. A major exception is in Chibchan speakers on both sides of the Panama isthmus, who have ancestry from both North and South America.