Upper Palaeolithic Siberian genome reveals dual ancestry of Native Americans

By M. Raghavan, P. Skoglund, K. Graf, M. Metspalu, Anders Albrechtsen, Ida Moltke, Simon Rasmussen, T. Stafford, Ludovic Antoine Alexandre Orlando, E. Metspalu and 21 more. Nature, 2013

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The origins of the First Americans remain contentious. Although Native Americans seem to be genetically most closely related to east Asians, there is no consensus with regard to which specific Old World populations they are closest to. Here we sequence the draft genome of an approximately 24,000-year-old individual (MA-1), from Mal’ta in south-central Siberia, to an average depth of 1×. To our knowledge this is the oldest anatomically modern human genome reported to date. The MA-1 mitochondrial genome belongs to haplogroup U, which has also been found at high frequency among Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic European hunter-gatherers, and the Y chromosome of MA-1 is basal to modern-day western Eurasians and near the root of most Native American lineages. Similarly, we find autosomal evidence that MA-1 is basal to modern-day western Eurasians and genetically closely related to modern-day Native Americans, with no close affinity to east Asians. This suggests that populations related to contemporary western Eurasians had a more north-easterly distribution 24,000 years ago than commonly thought. Furthermore, we estimate that 14 to 38% of Native American ancestry may originate through gene flow from this ancient population. This is likely to have occurred after the divergence of Native American ancestors from east Asian ancestors, but before the diversification of Native American populations in the New World. Gene flow from the MA-1 lineage into Native American ancestors could explain why several crania from the First Americans have been reported as bearing morphological characteristics that do not resemble those of east Asians. Sequencing of another south-central Siberian, Afontova Gora-2 dating to approximately 17,000 years ago, revealed similar autosomal genetic signatures as MA-1, suggesting that the region was continuously occupied by humans throughout the Last Glacial Maximum. Our findings reveal that western Eurasian genetic signatures in modern-day Native Americans derive not only from post-Columbian admixture, as commonly thought, but also from a mixed ancestry of the First Americans.

Subfields: Genetics, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7726033c6ce1ec67cde15296d84775f81b13c9e0

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Citations in the corpus

Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe (2015, neutral): “This second resurgence must have started during the Late Neolithic/Bronze Age period itself, as the Bell Beaker and Unetice groups had reduced Yamnaya ancestry compared to the earlier CordedWare, and comparable levels to that in some present-day Europeans (Fig.”
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Genome-wide patterns of selection in 230 ancient Eurasians (2015, background): “At least 14 kurgans were counted, and four were excavated (1, 2, 10, 11).”
Characterization of ancient and modern genomes by SNP detection and phylogenomic and metagenomic analysis using PALEOMIX (2014, background): “…unleashed, and today a series of additional ancient genomes have been characterized, including those of an ~100-year-old Australian Aborigine 17 , the Copper Age Iceman 18 , an ~24,000-year-old ancient Siberian from Mal’ta 19 , as well as high-quality genomes from Neandertals 20 and Denisovans 21 .”
ANGSD: Analysis of Next Generation Sequencing Data (2014, result): “are consistent with the current understanding of human migration out of Africa and even shows the recently proven link between Europeans and Native Americans through a shared ancestral central Asian population [31].”
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Ancient DNA and the rewriting of human history: be sparing with Occam’s razor (2016, background): “Insights into the Asian origin of the Native Americans came from a genome sequence of a 24,000-year-old boy found in Mal’ta in south-central Siberia [30].”
Demographic History and Genetic Adaptation in the Himalayan Region Inferred from Genome-Wide SNP Genotypes of 49 Populations (2018, methodology): “The ancient genomes used in this investigation were: 1) Eurasian hunter-gatherer (MA1,24,000-yearold Upper Palaeolithic Siberian) (Raghavan et al. 2014); 2) Bronze Age Yamnaya population (3,500–2,700 year old) (Allentoft et al. 2015); 3) Neolithic European farmer (LBK_EN, 5,500–4,800 year old) (Haak”