Early European and African Presence in South America? (Chachapoyas)

Today I will follow up on the "third component" of the Cachapoyas mentioned in a recent post-

I read a paper cited in by Guevara et al. (2020) in their references, which discussed this component (Barbieri C, Barquera R, Arias L, Sandoval JR, Acosta O, Zurita C, Aguilar-Campos A, Tito-Alvarez AM, Serrano-Osuna R, Gray RD, Mafessoni F, Heggarty P, Shimizu KK, Fujita R, Stoneking M, Pugach I, Fehren-Schmitz L. The Current Genomic Landscape of Western South America: Andes, Amazonia, and Pacific Coast. Mol Biol Evol. 2019 Dec 1;36(12):2698-2713. doi: 10.1093/molbev/msz174. PMID: 31350885; PMCID: PMC6878948.)

I came across some interesting facts which I share below.

The paper also looked into post-Columbian (after 1492) introgression of European (conquest) and African (slave trade) genes into the native Amerindians. The chart below is from this paper, it gives the admixture dates based on different analytical tools.

Admixture dates between European and African sources. Estimates of admixture are calculated with the MALDER and WAVELETS methods. Dates are expressed in generations ago and converted to calendar years using a generation time of 29 years.. Source

As expected most dates are located between the late 1500s and mid 1700s, but a few fall way earlier, even before the discovery of America! around 1380 AD.

The authors explain this oddity as follows:

"Finally, studies of ancient DNA have shown that as much as one third of the ancestry in modern Native Americans could be traced to western Eurasia (Raghavan et al. 2014). Similarly, modern-day Europeans were found to be a mixture of three ancestral populations, one of which was a population deeply related to Native Americans (Lazaridis et al. 2014). These findings imply that European (or more accurately, Eurasian) ancestry found in modern-day Native Americans may not have been acquired exclusively through admixture during the post-Columbian period, but instead may reflect a much deeper origin. It is therefore possible that the WT method is picking up this signal of shared ancestry, which predates European colonization, and hence infers dates for some populations that are too early to be consistent with the first appearance of the conquistadors in the Americas, only after 1492."

I am skeptical, a signal of ancient pre-Beringian Eurasian genetic material shared by Western Europeans and Native Americans? Far fetched. Perhaps the method is wrong, the generation times are shorter, or there was some type of pre-Columbian contact with Europeans (Genoese, Venetian, Viking, or evern older like Romans, Carthaginians, Greek, Minoans, and why not, Phoenicians).

The Tumbes signal indicates Yoruba (African) input around 1380! Could these have been slaves of European mariners? But, why would these genes appear among people living along the Pacific coast of South America, and not along the Atlantic coast? Wouldn't an early contact with Europeans or Africans have brought the same catastrophic Old World diseases to America and wiped out the native population?

Further studies could answere these questions.

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