Genome of 12,600 year-old boy from Clovis culture confirms origin of Amerindians

The things I wanted to confirm are:

1) Were there really Caucasoid or Europoid people living in North America before the Clovis culture, notably between 15,000 and 30,000 years ago ? Were these people replaced by another migration bringing Y-haplogroup Q and mtDNA haplogroup A, B, C and D ?

2) How did X2a get to North America and where did it come from ? Was it European, Middle Eastern, Central Asian ?

3) What paternal lineage was linked to X2a ? (really crucial question for understanding the origins of haplogroup X2) Was it R1* as has been suggested ?


Call it Solutrean hypothesis or whatever you like, I still strongly believe that Caucasoid people came to North America during the Solutrean (22-17 kya) or Gravettian (32-22 kya) periods. I only use those terms to define periods in time. I do not mean that these people came from Western Europe. Actually, my hunch is that the first inhabitants of North America were related to the Mal'ta boy and belonged to Y-haplogroup R* or R1* and mt-haplogroups U (including perhaps U2 and U4), X2 and perhaps even C (presumably C4 or C5). In terms of admixture, these people would have carried ANE and Kalash-like autosomal DNA.

I don't care much about similarities in stone tools. It could have happened by pure coincidence or have been learned from other people, maybe even by the remnants of Caucasoid Palaeolithic North Americans.

Perhaps I'm mistaken, but I thought the the term "Solutrean hypothesis" referred to the idea that the Solutrean toolkit and the Clovis toolkit seem similar, so some people think that the Clovis people are descended from European Solutreans, despite the time gap. I was suggesting that if there is any connection, it would have to have been via Siberia and not directly from Europe to the Americas. Some American archeologists are claiming that they're finding ancient European-like remains in the eastern U.S. during the same time as the Solutreans were in Europe but there are disputes about the dating of the remains and I'm personally sceptical. I think Mal'ta Boy shows that the connection between Europeans and Native Americans is via a common origin point in Asia.

Some archeologists have suggested that there were three waves of settlement of the Americas, one about 15-18 thousand years ago, one about 8 thousand years ago and the proto-Eskimos about 4 thousand years ago. Some archeologists and linguists concluded that the second wave of settlement was associated with the Dene people, who are the ones who have the most mtDNA C3, but some people have speculated that the second wave of immigration could have included Algonquin speaking people, who have most of the mtDNA X2. Both of those lineages could have been in Siberia for a long time before they came to the Americas before disappearing from Siberia, so their age of separation from other lineages don't tell us when they arrived in the Americas, IMO. And the Dene and Algonquins are also the Native Americans who seem to have a lot of R1, which made me wonder whether R1 could have come to the Americas at the same time as mtDNA C3 and X2. However, although none of the researchers seem to have tested the Y DNA any deeper than R1, sparky has been quick to point out more than once that those Native Americans who have been personally tested all seem to have European subclades, which he thinks destroys that idea. I think the issue requires further research, but, regardless of the R1 issue, it does seem as if mtDNA C3 and X2 would have come with the second wave of the populating of the Americas, if that theory holds up. I notice that some geneticists, including the folks who researched the Clovis genes, are now stating that there were two waves of settlement but they took place fairly close together, even though only one of them was involved in populating South America. I'm not sure that agrees with the conclusions of the archeologists, and the idea needs further research, I think. I suppose people could have come to the Americas much earlier than is now thought, but a longer stay in Siberia is also an explanation, I think.
 
Perhaps I'm mistaken, but I thought the the term "Solutrean hypothesis" referred to the idea that the Solutrean toolkit and the Clovis toolkit seem similar, so some people think that the Clovis people are descended from European Solutreans, despite the time gap. I was suggesting that if there is any connection, it would have to have been via Siberia and not directly from Europe to the Americas. Some American archeologists are claiming that they're finding ancient European-like remains in the eastern U.S. during the same time as the Solutreans were in Europe but there are disputes about the dating of the remains and I'm personally sceptical. I think Mal'ta Boy shows that the connection between Europeans and Native Americans is via a common origin point in Asia.

I do not believe that the pre-Clovis Caucasoid skeletons came directly from Europe. That sounds really far-fetched. As I said above, I would rather think that a Central or North Asian population related to the Mal'ta boy settled North America before Y-haplogroup Q1a. The only resemblance with Europeans would be owed to the fact that this R* or R1* population was also ancestral to modern Europeans (and South Asians). I admit that I have not studied the question in detail. I have a limited interest in Native American archaeology.

Some archeologists have suggested that there were three waves of settlement of the Americas, one about 15-18 thousand years ago, one about 8 thousand years ago and the proto-Eskimos about 4 thousand years ago. Some archeologists and linguists concluded that the second wave of settlement was associated with the Dene people, who are the ones who have the most mtDNA C3, but some people have speculated that the second wave of immigration could have included Algonquin speaking people, who have most of the mtDNA X2. Both of those lineages could have been in Siberia for a long time before they came to the Americas before disappearing from Siberia, so their age of separation from other lineages don't tell us when they arrived in the Americas, IMO. And the Dene and Algonquins are also the Native Americans who seem to have a lot of R1, which made me wonder whether R1 could have come to the Americas at the same time as mtDNA C3 and X2. However, although none of the researchers seem to have tested the Y DNA any deeper than R1, sparky has been quick to point out more than once that those Native Americans who have been personally tested all seem to have European subclades, which he thinks destroys that idea. I think the issue requires further research, but, regardless of the R1 issue, it does seem as if mtDNA C3 and X2 would have come with the second wave of the populating of the Americas, if that theory holds up. I notice that some geneticists, including the folks who researched the Clovis genes, are now stating that there were two waves of settlement but they took place fairly close together, even though only one of them was involved in populating South America. I'm not sure that agrees with the conclusions of the archeologists, and the idea needs further research, I think. I suppose people could have come to the Americas much earlier than is now thought, but a longer stay in Siberia is also an explanation, I think.

8,000 years seems like a reasonable time frame for the arrival of C3 in America. However, based on the current data, I doubt that the migration of C3 men also brought mtDNA X2a, simply because C3 is found in the western half of North America, while X2a is found in the eastern half. Besides I do not know of any C3 population in Northeast Asia who possess X2a or X2*. X2 is very rare in North Asia and limited to subclades like X2e2a and X2n, which are also found in the Near East and Europe. These lineages were probably brought by the Indo-Europeans during the Bronze Age or later.
 
... it is even possible that European maternal lineages be found among C3 populations in North America. These would be assumed to have resulted from admixture with European colonists in recent centuries, but it is not necessarily the case. Likewise, if a Bronze Age expansion from Mongolia to Canada did happen, then even Y-DNA R1a and R1b could be present in trace frequencies among Native American lineages.

I think only from the testing of ancient remains would we know if this seemingly unlikely event happened. As you've said, dna outside of the standard Q/C +A-X paradigm would look indistinguishable from European colonial mixing, especially if there was an introgression about the time of the European Chalcolithic.

What I do know is that the distance between pre-Clovis habitations, which keep getting older, and they array of technologies found in the immediate pre-Colombian times don't seem to jive with the current Q-X paradigm, especially given the results of the Clovis boy. The only other scenario I can imagine is a relatively stable and isolated American population for many, many thousands of years, and a very late intrance of C3 people from Asia bringing the standard set of modern technologies.

The position of "simplicity" in the Indian genome and the archealogical record don't Jive IMHO.
 
I think only from the testing of ancient remains would we know if this seemingly unlikely event happened. As you've said, dna outside of the standard Q/C +A-X paradigm would look indistinguishable from European colonial mixing, especially if there was an introgression about the time of the European Chalcolithic.

What I do know is that the distance between pre-Clovis habitations, which keep getting older, and they array of technologies found in the immediate pre-Colombian times don't seem to jive with the current Q-X paradigm, especially given the results of the Clovis boy. The only other scenario I can imagine is a relatively stable and isolated American population for many, many thousands of years, and a very late intrance of C3 people from Asia bringing the standard set of modern technologies.

The position of "simplicity" in the Indian genome and the archealogical record don't Jive IMHO.

I'm not sure the Amerindian technologies are proof of late but pre-Columbian contact. Different people have different opinions on the subject but I think the Native American cultivation of crops that originated in the Americas, such as maize, potatoes, squash and tobacco, could easily have been a separate development from farming in the rest of the world. Likewise with the development of pottery. I don't think we really know when bow hunting started - it could be a very old technique. And although Amerindians apparently used cold hammered copper for thousands of years, metallurgy only seems to have developed in South America about 2200 years BP, among groups that were famous for their pottery, such as the Moche. It took close to 1000 years for metallurgy to appear in Mexico, and it doesn't seem to have gone any further north than that during the pre-Columbian period. So I would say that metallurgy was definitely a separate development in the Americas, and pottery and farming could have been.
 
I'm not sure the Amerindian technologies are proof of late but pre-Columbian contact. Different people have different opinions on the subject but I think the Native American cultivation of crops that originated in the Americas, such as maize, potatoes, squash and tobacco, could easily have been a separate development from farming in the rest of the world. Likewise with the development of pottery. I don't think we really know when bow hunting started - it could be a very old technique. And although Amerindians apparently used cold hammered copper for thousands of years, metallurgy only seems to have developed in South America about 2200 years BP, among groups that were famous for their pottery, such as the Moche. It took close to 1000 years for metallurgy to appear in Mexico, and it doesn't seem to have gone any further north than that during the pre-Columbian period. So I would say that metallurgy was definitely a separate development in the Americas, and pottery and farming could have been.

I agree; the old beards have put us in the head that agriculture, metallurgy and the livestock are born in one place and this against all the evidence, that they are African, European, Siberian or American and Australian partially.
The problem is that nobody wants to frankly upsetting their enormous errors; the statues remain well bolted.
 
I don’t want to sound like a broken record, but as I said in the Solutrean hypothesis thread, what I find odd is the geographical distance separating the main Y-dna clade of Native Americans, Q-M3, and its closest branch on the tree, Q-L804. Q-L804 has only been found in northwest Europe, namely England, Scotland, Ireland, Norway, Sweden and German, while Q-M3 has only been found in the Americas. If we assume that their MRCA lived in Siberia around 15,000 years ago and one branch went east to America becoming Q-M3 and the other went west to northwest Europe becoming Q-L804, how come there’s no trace of any ancestors in between? I wonder how common that is. Is there any other known haplogroup clade where the geographical distance separating its closest branch like that is so large?
 
I'm not sure the Amerindian technologies are proof of late but pre-Columbian contact. Different people have different opinions on the subject but I think the Native American cultivation of crops that originated in the Americas, such as maize, potatoes, squash and tobacco, could easily have been a separate development from farming in the rest of the world. Likewise with the development of pottery. I don't think we really know when bow hunting started - it could be a very old technique. And although Amerindians apparently used cold hammered copper for thousands of years, metallurgy only seems to have developed in South America about 2200 years BP, among groups that were famous for their pottery, such as the Moche. It took close to 1000 years for metallurgy to appear in Mexico, and it doesn't seem to have gone any further north than that during the pre-Columbian period. So I would say that metallurgy was definitely a separate development in the Americas, and pottery and farming could have been.


I'm not suggesting that these technologies came from Europe necessarily or at all, as in my view they most likely came from Asia, but I don't buy the multi-invention scenario.
Take ceramic pottery, for example. Identifying high silica content base material, its refinement, tempering, coiling and then maintaining the right temperature/oxygen flow in a kiln to a product that in the end looks Eurasian seems more than coincidental. If cold-hammering native copper or coiling pottery is so naturally intuitive, then why didn't Gravettian or Magdallean people do this?

So in my mind immigrants must have been coming to America as late as 5-7 kypb regardless if the Americas were originally populated in the LGM.
 
I'm not suggesting that these technologies came from Europe necessarily or at all, as in my view they most likely came from Asia, but I don't buy the multi-invention scenario.
Take ceramic pottery, for example. Identifying high silica content base material, its refinement, tempering, coiling and then maintaining the right temperature/oxygen flow in a kiln to a product that in the end looks Eurasian seems more than coincidental. If cold-hammering native copper or coiling pottery is so naturally intuitive, then why didn't Gravettian or Magdallean people do this?

So in my mind immigrants must have been coming to America as late as 5-7 kypb regardless if the Americas were originally populated in the LGM.

Recent finds date the earliest known pottery at 20.000 ago.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/03/science/oldest-known-pottery-found-in-china.html?_r=0
 
If the Americas were populated by hunter/gatherers from Siberia, I don't think farming or pottery making would have been part of the skill set of such people. The archeological information available to date suggests that farming, pottery making and metallurgy in the Americas were local developments. And, once again, we have metallurgy first emerging in the form of copper smelting among people who made high quality pottery than was fired in kilns. That's significant to me because the melting temperature for copper is lower than the firing temperature for glazed pottery (which was only made in certain parts of the Americas).
 
If the Americas were populated by hunter/gatherers from Siberia, I don't think farming or pottery making would have been part of the skill set of such people. The archeological information available to date suggests that farming, pottery making and metallurgy in the Americas were local developments. And, once again, we have metallurgy first emerging in the form of copper smelting among people who made high quality pottery than was fired in kilns. That's significant to me because the melting temperature for copper is lower than the firing temperature for glazed pottery (which was only made in certain parts of the Americas).


I think as you; but the copper is a metal complicated has purified for the get but it is also the case for the gold, and then the mixture to obtain the bronze cannot be improvised., because it does not include only to mix with tin and therefore the aim is to obtain a hard tool and flexible enough; therefore it took a technology to arrive at the result and the bagpiper more sophisticated in the oven of the pottery or the meal would be a good track. But he did not seem appropriate to the Amerindians of industrially use this technology and we have the example in the pieces of steel (between 15th* or 16th century:Study by spectrography) that exchanged the Basques with the Algonquin tribes, and that they used so business has been dominated more as a sign of wealth or a precious stone by burying them with their leader or owner and as for gold it was.
The Indians seem to have an approach to the metallurgy very different from that of Europeans whose relationship is essentially utility; but it is also so that the deposits of obsidian, flint and basalt rock are very consistent on the America, which makes non-essential the forged metals; and the same for the wheel which seems it also without usefulness in the mountainous regions and should be used only for children's toys. But concerning what is utility to the Amerindian peoples the process is comparable.
According to my opinion or the belief that me are personal
* The Americas including the America-north are officially discovered in 1492, and everything that is is official text of gospel (taboo); but I am not a believer.
 
But it directly contradicts the Solutrean hypothesis, which states that there is a connection between the Solutrean culture and Clovis in particular. What's of interest is the similarities between Solutrean and Clovis industries, and now there's some genetic evidence (admittedly only 1 sample and we still don't have a true Solutrean sample) that there's no Solutrean-Clovis genetic connection. It doesn't disprove Solutrean entirely, but it's very strong evidence against it.

There is Clovis, Solutrean and Dyuktai, all 3 cultures have similar spearpoints.
Before this study, I believed there was a connection between Dyuktai and Clovis, now I doubt that.
It seems to me these spearpoints were develloped seperately by people who had advanced skills in working the stones and who had megafauna on their tundra hunting grounds.
Once the megafauna got extinct, the spearpoints dissapeared or diminished in size to hunt smaller game (bisons in North-America with Folsom points, reindeer in Europe with atlatl and bow and arrow).
 
I was utterly shocked that Raghavan et al., who consist of population geneticists from assorted European and American universities, could think that the Mal'ta boy was such a blend. I was even more dismayed when the scientific press meekly repeated those absurdities without thinking.


I told many times, some Native Indians are R1, and descending from Mal'ta.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0002929707612932

The same thing happened here : the researchers mentioned the possiblity that R1 was the result of admixture by European colonisers.
But everyone started aceepting this as a fact without proof.

I agree, there probably was some admixture, but it does not explain the 25 % R1 in Native Americans, and upto 80 % in some Northamerican tribes.

This study proves Clovis were not R1, but there must have been multiple migrations from Siberia.
 
I told many times, some Native Indians are R1, and descending from Mal'ta.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0002929707612932

The same thing happened here : the researchers mentioned the possiblity that R1 was the result of admixture by European colonisers.
But everyone started aceepting this as a fact without proof.

I agree, there probably was some admixture, but it does not explain the 25 % R1 in Native Americans, and upto 80 % in some Northamerican tribes.

This study proves Clovis were not R1, but there must have been multiple migrations from Siberia.

That's the study I was looking for. Thanks.

Interesting that there is even 5% of R1a1a among the Guaymi (aka Ngäbe) of Panama.
 
There is Clovis, Solutrean and Dyuktai, all 3 cultures have similar spearpoints.
Before this study, I believed there was a connection between Dyuktai and Clovis, now I doubt that.
It seems to me these spearpoints were develloped seperately by people who had advanced skills in working the stones and who had megafauna on their tundra hunting grounds.
Once the megafauna got extinct, the spearpoints dissapeared or diminished in size to hunt smaller game (bisons in North-America with Folsom points, reindeer in Europe with atlatl and bow and arrow).

this is the effect of a disaster of a giant asteroid that explodes by hitting the resistive layer of the lower atmosphere and the huge fire forests that covered the plains and were similar to the Siberian forest. And to destroy it needed only a few weeks.
R* can be originally in the region of the Lake Baikal, they find R1 in regions Siberian and even R2 who would have been born there and would have follow migrated southward.
Can to be the forefather of Q and R had made the road of Pakistan to northward and would have then become divided.
But it makes go back up much more in time far but can be it is necessary
 
And this is exactly why, Kalash are a good source population. L is not Indian nor is G exclusively Iranian. Ultimately L, R, H and J have ultimately one ANE origin. People are so excited about the R* found in the Mal'ta individual while they completely forget that Kalash have 7% of R* and 2.5% R1* themselves.

The only solace I find is a hint of Irano-Gedrosian admixture in the Anzick-1 sample's K=11 admixture. The Anzick boy has nearly 100% of Native American admixture, 0% of Siberian, 0% East Asian (Chinese, Japanese), BUT 1 or 2% of the admixture that peaks in the Kalash, and is also found at high frequency in the Hazara, Sindhi, Balochi, Burusho, Persians, etc., and at a lower (10-15%) frequency in all Caucasian and European populations, except the Sardinians. This part of the original admixture of Y-DNA R, and could confirm that R1* was indeed present alongside X2a in the Upper Palaeolithic North American population that was replaced by the Clovis people.


Mal'ta has a large (37%) Kalash component so the small Kalash component may actually be proof of gene flow from Malta people to proto-amerindians:

http://img43.imageshack.us/img43/2810/hhx4.png


I don’t want to sound like a broken record, but as I said in the Solutrean hypothesis thread, what I find odd is the geographical distance separating the main Y-dna clade of Native Americans, Q-M3, and its closest branch on the tree, Q-L804. Q-L804 has only been found in northwest Europe, namely England, Scotland, Ireland, Norway, Sweden and German, while Q-M3 has only been found in the Americas. If we assume that their MRCA lived in Siberia around 15,000 years ago and one branch went east to America becoming Q-M3 and the other went west to northwest Europe becoming Q-L804, how come there’s no trace of any ancestors in between?

Afontova Gora is a find that was rather contaminated. They found markers for R1a and Q. R1a is considered to be due to the contaminations.

http://www.anthrogenica.com/showthread.php?1656-Afontova-R1a/page7

Also, with globe 13 you see a tiny American Indian admixture in Swedish hunter-gatherers. So it may very well be possible that ANE brought Q to the west as well as eastward.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Aif8O5EXGNI/UI7Frkq91DI/AAAAAAAAHEw/ZLHV2wQwi4U/s1600/globe13.png
 
Thanks, epoch. It's kind of a crap shoot but maybe it's an ancient admixture within those ancient Swedish hunter gatherer samples. We seem to be having relatively good success with those high latitude ancient dna samples, so I suspect a Q will eventually turn up sometime.
 
@epoch: I just noticed something. In the Swedish hunter-gatherer Ajv70 globe13 breakdown you gave:
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Aif8O5EXGN...00/globe13.png in addition to the 3.1% Amerindian, it also shows 3.5% Australasian. And in the link you gave of the 9-component breakdown of MA-1, it looks like MA-1 came out as 16% Amerindian and 4% Papuan/Melanesian: http://img43.imageshack.us/img43/2810/hhx4.png I wonder if it has to do with the MP internal node that joins haplogroups M,P,Q and R together on one branch of the tree: http://dienekes.blogspot.ca/2013/11/a-priori-y-chromosome-phylogeny-from.html
And y-dna M is certainly centred around Melanesia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_M-P256
 
Thanks, epoch. It's kind of a crap shoot but maybe it's an ancient admixture within those ancient Swedish hunter gatherer samples. We seem to be having relatively good success with those high latitude ancient dna samples, so I suspect a Q will eventually turn up sometime.

@epoch: I just noticed something. In the Swedish hunter-gatherer Ajv70 globe13 break
down you gave:
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Aif8O5EXGN...00/globe13.png in addition to the 3.1% Amerindian, it also shows 3.5% Australasian. And in the link you gave of the 9-component breakdown of MA-1, it looks like MA-1 came out as 16% Amerindian and 4% Papuan/Melanesian: http://img43.imageshack.us/img43/2810/hhx4.png I wonder if it has to do with the MP internal node that joins haplogroups M,P,Q and R together on one branch of the tree: http://dienekes.blogspot.ca/2013/11/a-priori-y-chromosome-phylogeny-from.html
And y-dna M is certainly centred around Melanesia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_M-P256

It will be extremely interesting to see what the oldest Siberian genome of the Ust-Ishim femur will be like, when it will published. Already information is provided that it contains larger chunks of Neanderthal DNA than current day populations. It appears to be a very good example so admixture results could be a surprise.

http://dienekes.blogspot.nl/2014/03/oldest-modern-human-genome-from-siberia.html

On account of the Australasian, Papuan and Melanesian admixture of MA-1 and Ajvide an idea came up: Could that be actually Denisovan admixture? Mind you, this is a wild assumption.
 
It will be extremely interesting to see what the oldest Siberian genome of the Ust-Ishim femur will be like, when it will published. Already information is provided that it contains larger chunks of Neanderthal DNA than current day populations. It appears to be a very good example so admixture results could be a surprise.

http://dienekes.blogspot.nl/2014/03/oldest-modern-human-genome-from-siberia.html

On account of the Australasian, Papuan and Melanesian admixture of MA-1 and Ajvide an idea came up: Could that be actually Denisovan admixture? Mind you, this is a wild assumption.

I don't expect any connection with the Clovis boy, Ust-Ishim is western Siberia and the time difference is almost 30.000 years.
 
Yes, the Ust-Ishim genome should be interesting. I'm glad that this time they seem to have gotten good Neanderthal dna quantifications. And yes, maybe Denisovan dna was carried by y-dna M. It will be interesting to see how all this sorts out in the end - if we ever get enough samples.
 

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