At last a paper that sheds some light on the origin of Native Americans. I was pleasantly surprised to see a paper today that postulates that America had two distinct founding populations and that the older one, found in South America, is linked to Negrito people of the Andamans, Papuans, New Guineans and Australian Aboriginals.
This is the paper: Pontus Skoglund, Swapan Mallick, Maria Cátira Bortolini, Niru Chennagiri, Tábita Hünemeier, Maria Luiza Petzl-Erler, Francisco Mauro Salzano,Nick Patterson,David Reich. Nature (2015) Genetic evidence for two founding populations of the Americas doi:10.1038/nature14895 Received 05 February 2015 Accepted 14 July 2015 Published online 21 July 2015,
The paper is here LINK; the following image is the map that portrays that similarity between those groups:
Just in case you are expecting a post-discovery of American admixture of Asian genes with Amerindian ones... the paper on page 3 shows that they are closer to South East Asians Onge than to Polynesians. The closing paragraphs hint at a very ancient origin for these Amerindian ancestors and this is because though they are similar to the Andaman Negrito-Papuan group they "are not particularly closely related to any of them" and the original population that later led to these Amerindian ancestors became extinct in Asia. By the way, the Andaman natives and the Negrito people are believed to be among the oldest humans out of Africa.
Allow me to throw a wild idea: how can we be sure the flow was from South east Asia to America and not the other way round? an Out of America move from a basal archaic population that lived in the Americas?
And I recall my post on Y chromosome Haplogroup C, which is present in America at low frequencies and... also found in SE Asia.
It is indeed an interesting discovery and is I believe related to the recent paper on the Botocudos, which I wrote about a few weeks ago: "Put together we could conjecture that the old human lineage that peopled Asia reached the New World long before later East Asian or Siberian waves got there. That they are found in some secluded parts of America. They are old, and linked to Melanesia, Australia (whose inhabitants recently moved across the Pacific peopling Polynesia)."
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The analyses show conclusively that the "Botocudo" samples in the earlier paper are pure Polynesians. They could have come straight out of the Cook Islands, and their paper trail is murky enough that I frankly think this is a clerical mistake on the part of the museum. Nothing they present even convinces me that the individuals ever lived in Brazil (the isotopic data are hopelessly inconclusive).
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