Natural Science Forum / Biology / Paleontology / December 2007

Or USA and Costa Rica and Peru and Lithuania for that matter.

Last time I checked the Pacific Coast between Canada and
So Amerika was the United States or have they changed that?
He's talking about "the INTERIOR" of the US and SAmerica.
I thought that was clear as a vampire on a moron?

In sci.bio.paleontology Morganba <nicolata@piccolo.org> wrote:

Excellent ... but was a full repost necessary for that comment?

very nice post! ... and Verhenhaegenboggendoggan didnt even
comment. There is a God! (or he's in a padded cell for the night).
Nice work. Thanks.

Robert Karl Stonjek wrote:
Northwest Passage: Americas populated via Alaska, genetics show
Brian Vastag
A single population of prehistoric Siberians crossed the Bering Strait into
Alaska and subsequently fanned out to populate North and South America,
according to a new genetic analysis of present-day indigenous Americans.
The study also hints that early Americans reached Central and South America
by migrating down the Pacific coast by land or sea and only later spread
into the interior of South America.
"We have good evidence that a single migration [from Siberia] contributed a
large fraction of the ancestry of the Americas," says population geneticist
Noah Rosenberg of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, who led the large
international study team.
The finding draws on the largest database of Native American genetics ever
compiled. The data include DNA from nearly 500 people belonging to 29 groups
scattered across Canada, Mexico, Central America, and South America. The
researchers also studied samples from 14 Tundra Nentsi individuals living in
eastern Siberia.
"They should be commended for bringing together an enormous database,
something no one has done before," says Tom Dillehay, an archaeologist at
Vanderbilt University in Nashville.
The team examined 678 genetic markers in the human genome and found that one
of the markers ties every Native American group to the Tundra Nentsi. The
marker, moreover, is found nowhere else in the world. "It's extremely
difficult to explain this kind of pattern unless all of the Native American
populations ... have a large degree of shared ancestry," says Rosenberg.
In addition, the Canadian groups share more genes with the Siberians than do
the groups in Central and South America, Rosenberg and his team report
online in the November PLoS Genetics.
Tracing further migration through the Americas, the team then correlated
genetic variations among different tribes with each group's location as
measured along inland or coastal routes. The genetic data suggest that most
migration to Central and South America followed the coast.
"That's the easy way south," says Vance Holliday, an archaeologist at the
University of Arizona in Tucson. He cautions, however, that the groups that
populated the South American interior would have had to surmount the
formidable Andes Mountains.
Despite the migration findings, Holliday and Dillehay both say that
southward migration along interior routes should still be considered.
Dillehay notes that the current study excludes Native Americans from the
United States and eastern Brazil. "It's a sampling bias," he says, that
might have erroneously favored the Pacific coast migration model.
Rosenberg says that a second paper will soon address the genetics of tribes
in the United States and whether there was more than one major Siberian
migration.
While the study points to an eastern Siberian origin for most of the genes
that spread across the Americas, it can't rule out small genetic
contributions from other groups, says Kari Britt Schroeder of the University
of California, Davis. In 2001, scientists unearthed 8,000- to
11,000-year-old skulls in Brazil that strikingly resemble today's Australian
aborigines (SN: 4/7/01, p. 212). The find fueled speculation that several
waves of immigrants from different parts of Asia reached the Americas.
"Even if Native Americans share a lot of ancestry from a single origin,
there still could be contributions from other groups," says Schroeder.
Source: ScienceNews
http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20071201/fob2.asp
Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek

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I changed the format

So all living Americans share some ancestors.  This has to be true because
the all share one marker. That does not prove they all came to the America's
in the same wave or that some aren't hauling around genes from some groups
that aren't represented in other individuals. Now if they all shared several
dozen markers....It still wouldn't tell us much about the dead.