Today's post continues looking into the subject of mtDNA haplogrop M among Native Americans. As mentioned, there are no further papers on the subject, but genetic ancestry-genealogical websites provided some additional information.
In DNAExplained.com while explaining Native American mtDNA haplogroups, it states that M is not commonly thought of as being Amerindian, however after mentioning Malhi's 2007 paper, it provides some fresh data:
"One additional source for haplogroup M was found in GenBank noted as M1a1e “USA”, but there were also several Eurasian submissions for M1a1e as well. However, Doron Behar’s dates for M1a1e indicate that the haplogroup was born about 9,813 years ago, plus or minus 4,022 years, giving it a range of 5,971 to 13,835 years ago, meaning that M1a1e could reasonably be found in both Asia and the Americas. There were no Genographic results for M1a1e. At this point, M1a1e cannot be classified as Native, but remains on the radar.
Hapologroup M1 was founded 23,679 years ago +-4377 years. It is found in the Genographic Project in Cuba, Venezuela and is noted as Native in the Midwest US. M1 is also found in Colorado and Missouri in the haplogroup M project at Family Tree DNA, but the individuals did not have full sequence tests nor was additional family information available in the public project"
Behar's age data comes from Table S5 (online as pdf here see p.34) shown in the following image from the paper Behar DM, et al. A "Copernican" reassessment of the human mitochondrial DNA tree from its root. Am J Hum Genet. 2012 Apr 6;90(4):675-84. doi: 10.1016/j.ajhg.2012.03.002. Erratum in: Am J Hum Genet. 2012 May 4;90(5):936. PMID: 22482806; PMCID: PMC3322232.
mtDNA M1
Regarding M1, as it has an original source in North Africa and the Horn of Africa Area (see the green colored areas in the following heatmap from Pennarun et al. 2012
(paper)
This means that people from this area could have migrated to the American Midwest (Colorado and Missouri), Cuba or Venezuela at any time from Somalia, Tunez, Egypt or Morocco after the discovery of America.
The Punic connection
For those who believe in the pre-Columbian exploration of America by Phoenicians or Carthaginians, notice that Tunez was the spot where Carthage was located. No M1 in Lebanon (homeland of the Phoenicians), but plenty on the coastal areas of Algiers, Morocco and Tunez, part of the Carthaginian territory until Rome vanquished it in 200 BC, after the Punic wars.
Slave Trade?
However, unless the samples from the Midwestern USA are dated as pre-Columbian, I am inclined to believe in recent admixture of M1 in that region or even people who were captured by the Arab slave trade (starting in the 7th-century AD) along the East African coast and moved them around their empire in Arabia, Levant, North Africa and Spain. The European slave trad across the Atlantic (15th-century - early 19th-century) was based on the Western coast of Africa, where M1 is very infrequent, or absent.
A paper (Lee, E. J., Anderson, L. M., Dale, V., & Merriwether, D. A. (2009). MtDNA origins of an enslaved labor force from the 18th century Schuyler Flatts Burial Ground in colonial Albany, NY: Africans, Native Americans, and Malagasy?. Journal of Archaeological Science, 36(12), 2805-2810.) reported the mtDNA results from a cemetery located on a homestead in New York state, with the remains of people who are assumed to have been slaves working on the estate. Of the seven individuals tested, four of them had L2 or L3 mtDNA haplogroups, which are Subsaharian African and definitely belonged to African slaves. One of the remaining three samples were from a Native American with X2 haplogroup and is asigned to a member of the Micmac tribe. The other two remains, "share mutations with individuals from Madagascar (Hurles et al., 2005). Only one is confirmed as subhaplogroup M7 (SFB9) and we were unable to identify the specific subhaplogroup within M for the other individual." The link with Madagascar is tenuous in my opinion. The authors add:
"Subhaplogroup M7 (SFB9) is commonly found in east and southeast Asia (Kivisild et al., 2002) but this haplotype, along with SFB12, closely resembles lineages found in Madagascar (Hurles et al., 2005). The individual from burial 12 was determined to be of African ancestry from the morphological analysis. Historical documents suggest several hundreds of people from Madagascar being imported for the slave labor force by the end of the 17th century as a result of an illegal trade between New York merchants and East African pirates (Matson, 1998; Platt, 1969). While there has been a report of a Native American haplogroup M from British Columbia of approximately 5000 years old (Malhi et al., 2007), based on the historical evidence of the region it seems more likely that these individuals are of Malagasy origin rather than Native American."
Checking out the paper cited above (Hurles ME, Sykes BC, Jobling MA, Forster P. The dual origin of the Malagasy in Island Southeast Asia and East Africa: evidence from maternal and paternal lineages. Am J Hum Genet. 2005 May;76(5):894-901. doi: 10.1086/430051. Epub 2005 Mar 25. PMID: 15793703; PMCID: PMC1199379.) I was not able to identify how Lee et al. defined a Magalasy origin for the remains. Below is the data from both papers.
Madagascar and the Austronesians
The point that is overlooked is that the Island of Madagascar was peopled around 2000 years ago (~350 BC-500 AD) by people who sailed from what is now Indonesia, with Austonesian genes. The M variant in Madagascar came from Indonesia.
In fact, (Toomas Kivisild, Helle-Viivi Tolk, Jüri Parik, Yiming Wang, Surinder S. Papiha, Hans-Jürgen Bandelt, Richard Villems, The Emerging Limbs and Twigs of the East Asian mtDNA Tree, Molecular Biology and Evolution, Volume 19, Issue 10, October 2002, Pages 1737–1751, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.molbev.a003996) provide interesting data about the M7 variant:
"Haplogroup M7, although characteristic for East Asian populations, has not been found in the northeast of the continent. It is also very rare in Central Asians. This haplogroup has been detected so far in China and Vietnam, the Korean peninsula and Japanese islands, as well as among Mongols, the West Siberian Mansi, and island Southeast Asia. Koreans possess lineages from both the southern and the northern haplogroup complex and share M7a with Japanese, Ainu, and Ryukyu islanders. The geographic specificity of the boughs and twigs of M7 (see fig. 2 ) is most intriguing: M7c1c is specific to island Southeast Asia and M7b1 is of Chinese provenance, whereas M7a, M7b2, and M7c1b are found almost exclusively in Korea and Japan. In fact, M7 is one of the prevailing haplogroups not only among Japanese (of Honshu and Kyushu) but also for Ainu and Ryukyuans, thus testifying to a common genetic background. There is very little haplotype sharing in M7 across the distinguished populations except for the ancestral types of the (named) nested clades (see fig. 3 ); in particular, no single type is shared between Ainu and Ryukyuans."
The image below shows M7 variants a, b, and c. Their estimated age and their geographic dispersion as well as frequency (slice size). Notice "a" is in the Japanese and Korean area, "c" is Borneo, Philippines and the Majuro people of the Marshall Islands, indicating an eastward flow into the Pacific (did it go further east towards America?) The "b" variant is found in China, Vietnam, Thailand, and Taiwan. The ages are M7 = 61,000 ± 17,000. M7a = 37,000 ± 20,000. M7b = 56,000 ± 24,000. M7c = 41,000 ± 20,000.
Which subvariant of M7 was found in the old New York farm cemetery? The tree below from Kong et al. 2003 shows the SNP markers that identify the different variants. I used this source, because the images in Kivisild et al. 2002 are not clear enough to read the SNPs.
Comparing the information, I only found one marker that coincides, the transpositon at position "146" in the New York sample of M7 (T → C), which is also shown as a marker for M7c in the image above. So the NY person carried the variant spanning the Philippines, parts of Indonesia like Borneo, and the Marshall Islands and parts of China M7C. It also reached Madagascar, see this heatmap of M7c with its current global distribution.
This variant could have reached America 20 kya crossing through Beringia, through people from Northern China, Mongolia, Japan, etc. If so it could have been the one discovered in Lake China by Malhi, which vanished there without a trace (perhaps some of it managed to make its way to the 18th or 19th century New York).
It could also have arrived via Madagascar to New York, with slave trade, but the number of slaves transported from Madagascar to the US was very small -despite the claims of the authors of the cemetry paper. The odds that two slaves from Magalasy would have ended up on the same farm is on the Hudson River is quite improbable, yet, possible. The transpacific route from the Philippines to Mexico during Spanish Colonial times cannot be discarded either. The possibility of transpacific pre-Hispanic voyages from Island South East Asia to America is slim, but can't be ruled out.
Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall ©
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