Easter Island's Polynesian Genetics

Angela

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See: Lars Fehren-Schmitxl (and Pontus Skoglund)
[h=1]Genetic Ancestry of Rapanui before and after European Contact[/h]http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(17)31194-6

"The origins and lifeways of the inhabitants of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), a remote island in the southeast Pacific Ocean, have been debated for generations. Archaeological evidence substantiates the widely accepted view that the island was first settled by people of Polynesian origin, as late as 1200 CE [1, 2, 3, 4]. What remains controversial, however, is the nature of events in the island’s population history prior to the first historic contact with Europeans in 1722 CE. Purported contact between Rapa Nui and South America is particularly contentious, and recent studies have reported genetic evidence for Native American admixture in present-day indigenous inhabitants of Rapa Nui [5, 6, 7, 8]. Statistical modeling has suggested that this genetic contribution might have occurred prior to European contact [6]. Here we directly test the hypothesis that the Native American admixture of the current Rapa Nui population predates the arrival of Europeans with a paleogenomic analysis of five individual samples excavated from Ahu Nau Nau, Anakena, dating to pre- and post-European contact, respectively. Complete mitochondrial genomes and low-coverage autosomal genomes show that the analyzed individuals fall within the genetic diversity of present-day and ancient Polynesians, and we can reject the hypothesis that any of these individuals had substantial Native American ancestry. Our data thus suggest that the Native American ancestry in contemporary Easter Islanders was not present on the island prior to European contact and may thus be due to events in more recent history."
 
Another myth is gone. I love science.
 
It seems the original Rapa Nui people was already a mix between Asian and Papuan, but now they have absorbed such a significant mix of Amerindian and Caucasoid.

View attachment 9383View attachment 9383
 
Sorry, Hauteville, I tried to approve the attachments, but they don't show up.
 
Sorry, Hauteville, I tried to approve the attachments, but they don't show up.
No problem Angela here is the graph.

 
No problem Angela here is the graph.


Thanks. There's the Cree with their almost, what, 40% West Eurasian? The Cree are Algonquin speakers, as are the Ojibway and other smaller tribes from that area, and as LeBrok pointed out above, the Ojibway have 80% R1b.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cree

It would be interesting to see the percentages for the rest of the "mainland" Amerindian tribes. The ones in the west, for example, had contact with Europeans quite a bit later, and at a time when families were moving out west, not lone male fur trappers, etc. Also, there was a difference between the French (and Spanish) and the British attitude toward mating with non-European women. I think part of what we may be seeing and which is also applicable to what happened in Europe with the Indo-Europeans is not that all the Indian women had children with European men, but that the children with admixture may have had more immunity to "European" diseases, and so it was their offspring which survived.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cree

Interestingly, though, most, if not all, French-Canadians don't have Amerindian admixture. It seems that like in Louisiana, the "mixed blood" children were either absorbed into the mother's tribe or became part of a new population: in Louisiana the "colored" Creoles, and in the Canadian areas the "metis".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Métis
 

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