The Genetic History of the Russian Old Settlers of the Arctic Coast of Yakutia from the Village Russkoye Ust’ye

Abstract

There are various hypotheses on the origin and time of the appearance of Russian settlements in the Arctic Ocean shores of Eastern Siberia. In order to study the history of the formation of the russian old-settlers of Yakutia, we analyzed the lineages of the Y-chromosome in three groups of residents of the village of Russkoye Ust’ye, located in the delta of the Indigirka River (“Pomors”, “Cossacks” and “Zashivertsy”), comparable with the main migration waves of settlement of Russians on the Arctic coast of Eastern Siberia. For the first time, the characteristic features of the genetic structure of the population of Russkoustinans are described by the data of a genome-wide analysis of 740,000 single nucleotide polymorphisms. The results of the study to a greater extent testify in favor of the “Pomor” hypothesis of the origin of the Russkoustinians.