Abstract
The founding of New World populations by Asian peoples is the focus of considerable archaeological and genetic research, and there persist important questions on when and how these events occurred. Genetic data offer great potential for the study of human population history, but there are significant challenges in discerning distinct demographic processes. A new method for the study of diverging populations was applied to questions on the founding and history of Amerind-speaking Native American populations. The model permits estimation of founding population sizes, changes in population size, time of population formation, and gene flow. Analyses of data from nine loci are consistent with the general portrait that has emerged from archaeological and other kinds of evidence. The estimated effective size of the founding population for the New World is fewer than 80 individuals, approximately 1% of the effective size of the estimated ancestral Asian population. By adding a splitting parameter to population divergence models it becomes possible to develop detailed portraits of human demographic history. Analyses of Asian and New World data support a model of a recent founding of the New World by a population of quite small effective size.
Highlights
Archeological evidence, as well as anatomical, linguistic, and genetic evidence, have shown that the original human inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere arrived from Asia during the Late Pleistocene [1,2,3,4]
It is possible that when considered together, and polymorphism and divergence from chimpanzees are considered under a common neutral model, that there is evidence of selection
The analyses in this study suggest a recent founding of the New World Amerind-speaking peoples by a small population of effective size near 70, followed by population growth in the New World
Summary
Archeological evidence, as well as anatomical, linguistic, and genetic evidence, have shown that the original human inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere arrived from Asia during the Late Pleistocene [1,2,3,4]. In the case of genetic data there occurs a large stochastic variance of the coalescent history among genes that causes different loci to vary widely in levels of genetic variation and in apparent patterns of relationships among populations [20,21,22]. This stochastic variance is sometimes overlooked, for example in discussions of the histories of the individual DNA sequence haplotypes [18], and it is easy to underestimate the many possible histories that are consistent with a finding that haplotypes are shared by different populations [23,24,25]
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