Tuesday, April 1, 2025

Who were the Paleoamericans? A False positive? A few Amazonian tribes have current "alleles" that are Australian aborigine!

 Recent analyses have also shown that some groups in Brazil share more alleles with Australasians (indigenous New Guineans, Australians, and Andaman Islanders) () and an ∼40,000 BP individual from northern China () than do other Central and South Americans. Such patterns suggest that these groups do not entirely descend from a single homogeneous population and instead derive from a mixture of populations, one of which, Population Y, bore a distinctive affinity to Australasians. Notably, our study includes data from individuals such as those from the Lapa do Santo site who have a cranial morphology known as “Paleoamerican,” argued to indicate two distinct New-World-founding populations (). Here, we test directly the hypothesis that a Paleoamerican cranial morphology was associated with a lineage distinct from the one that contributed to other Native Americans (whether the proposed Population Y or another).

https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(18)31380-1?wpmobileexternal=true 

 Our failure to find significant evidence of Australasian or Paleolithic East Asian affinities in any of the ancient Central and South American individuals raises the question of what ancient populations could have contributed the Population Y signal in Surui and other Amazonian groups and increases the previously small chance that this signal—despite the strong statistical evidence for it—was a false-positive. A priority is to search for the Population Y signal in additional ancient genomes.

 

 

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