David Reich's take on the Y population and Australasians

The mysterious and ancient ghost population known as "Y" Population mentioned in yesterday's post (and in several other posts over the past years) was explored in depth by Harvard geneticist, David Reich in his 2018 book Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past 🔓.

In Chapter 7 (starts on p. 155), dedicated to the original ancestors of the Native Americans, Reich explains the theories and timing of the peopling of America based on current archaeological and genetic data.

Reich tells how the one wave peopled South America mutated over the years, and now we believe that at least four separate migrations led to the current makeup of Native Americans. Of relevance is the section starting on p. 176 that looks into the Y population.

The basics are the following: Walter Neves was the first to propose (see post) base on skull morphology, that ancient Brazilian paleoindians, like those found in Lagoa Santa were very similar to those of Australian aboriginals and Melanesians from Papua New Guinea.

Fig 21 in Reich's book, original caption reads: Despite extraordinary geographic distance, populations in the Amazon share ancestry with Australians, New Guineans, and Andamanese to a greater extent than with other Eurasians. This may reflect an early movement of humans into the Americas from a source population that is no longer substantially represented in northeast Asia.

This was very controversial, and opposed by the mainstream anthropologists. However, Pontus Skoglund investigated this possibility and after looking into the genetics of different native people, "found two Native American populations, both from the Amazon region of Brazil, that are more closely related to Australasians than to other world populations... Skoglund found weaker signals of genetic affinity to Australasians, but still probably real, in other Native American populations ringing the Amazon basin. He estimated that the proportion of ancient ancestry in these populations was small—1 to 6 percent—with the rest being consistent with First American ancestry."

This pattern appeared not only in Skoglund's data (by the way, Skoglund was working with Reich as a postdoctoral student), but in other data sets collected by other scientists. Furthermore, they also showed that it wasn't a recent admixture with people from Australia or Papua New Guinea, nor the result of Polynesians carrying these alleles across the Pacific to America.

The remarkable findings are that:

• Similar yet not closely related: "while Amazonians had their strongest affinity to indigenous people from Australia, New Guinea, and the Andaman Islands (compared to East Asians as a baseline), they were not particularly close to any of them"
• It was highest among the Suruí, Karitiana, and Xavante groups, and almost absent elsewhere: "We found little or no Population Y ancestry in Mesoamerica or in South Americans to the west of the high Andes. We also did not detect Population Y ancestry in the almost thirteen-thousand-year old genome of the Clovis culture infant from the northern United States, or in present-day Algonquin speakers from Canada. The Population Y geographic distribution is largely limited to Amazonia, providing yet more evidence for an ancient origin" Reich attributes this limited distribution to an "original pioneering population that was once more broadly distributed and was then marginalized by the expansion of other groups."
• Two groups of Native Americans with skulls similar to those of Neves' Paleoindians were tested by other researchers, they were Pericués of Baja California, and Fuegians in Argentina, however, neither group carried the signal of Population Y alleles.

This evidence suggests different population possibilities to Reich: (1) Population Y reached America first, spread across the continent and later, when the "First Americans" (actually, the current ones, but not first, they were second) arrived they displaced and replaced the Population Y people "either completely or only partially, as in Amazonia. Population Y ancestry may have survived better in Amazonia than it did elsewhere because of the relative impenetrability of the Amazonian environment." So, in the Amazons the original Population Y was not razed, but admixed gradually with the newcomers.

The current levels of Population Y ancestry in the Amazonians may be small (~2%), Reich states that the impact of the ghost populations should not be dismissed. Reich proposes a second theory (2) in which he supposes that the Population Y people as they walked across Asia and Siberia into "northern North America where the ancestors of First Americans were also living. It is likely that Population Y was already mixed with large amounts of First American–related ancestry when it started expanding into South America. If so, then the ancestry derived from a lineage related to southern Asians is only a kind of “tracer dye” for Population Y ancestry—like the heavy metals injected into patients’ veins in hospitals to track the paths of their blood vessels in a CT scan. Our estimate of around 2 percent Population Y ancestry in the Suruí is based on the assumption that Population Y traversed the entirety of Northeast Asia and America without mixing with other people it encountered. If we allow for the likelihood that there was mixture with populations related to First Americans on the way, the proportion of Population Y in the Suruí could be as high as 85 percent and still produce the observed statistical evidence of relatedness to Australasians. If the true proportion is even a fraction of this, then the story of First Americans expanding into virgin territory is profoundly misleading. Instead, we need to think in terms of an expansion of a highly substructured founding population of the Americas. The history and timing of the arrival of Population Y in the Americas is likely to be resolved only with recovery of ancient DNA from skeletons with Population Y ancestry."

So, in this second scenario, the Y Population isn't the original one, instead it was part of the First People reaching America, in a very highly structured population which somehow (Reich does not explain the mechanism though!) had already admixed with other Native groups, yet did not leave any signal in North America or Central America, or anwyhere other than the Amazon region.

I agree that further studies are needed, and finding Population Y remains will be of capital intererst, but also, we need a theory proposing a clear mechanism, other than Bottlenecks and genetic drift, to explain how the Population Y signal was erased, and is absent among present day Amerindians all across America —except for these three Amazonian groups.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall © 

Denisovan admixture within America?

Last may I published a brief post about a paper by Castro e Silva et al., (2026). The evolutionary history and unique genetic diversity of Indigenous Americans. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10406-w. The paper is an in-depth study of South American natives' genetics, the three waves that peopled the subcontinent, and the "remarkable allele sharing with Australasian populations, probably originating from an ancient admixture event and partly maintained by selection for more than 10,000 years." It attributes this permanence across ten millennia because this admixture was positively selected for due to benefits these alleles provided to those carrying them.

Archaic Introgression

I re-read the article and took note of the part that says that the Australasian signal is not the result of an archaic introgression, which means that Denisovans didn't share these same genes with Oceanian and American natives, there were different groups admixing with each population. The paper states: "Furthermore, we identified candidate regions of adaptive archaic introgression from Neanderthals and Denisovans that contribute to functions related to immunity, metabolism and epidermal integrity, thereby reinforcing the role of archaic alleles in shaping the evolutionary trajectory of non-African populations. Importantly, our data indicate minimal overlap between genomic regions with Australasian affinity and those introgressed from archaic hominins, supporting the interpretation that these signals represent distinct evolutionary phenomena."

Australasian signal

The Australasian signal in Amerindians is very very peculiar, it has a high prevalence in some groups that live in the Southwestern Amazon region and Chaco (these groups are the Awajún, Ayoreo, Guarani, Karitiana, Sirionó, Suruí, and Tsimané). This is known as the introgression from a "Y" population, or Ypykuéra (a Tupi word meaning "ancestor") which is a "ghost lineage" of ancient Amerindians with a high Australasian genetic content.

The paper confirms that the distribution of Australasian "alleles" is not uniform, it shows a "partially discontinuous spatiotemporal pattern" which suggests, according to the authors that "this ancestry was present during the initial peopling of America." It is also very ancient because the paper finds that Amerindians "diverged from other continental groups between about 70,000 and 15,000 years ago."

The paper states that isolation of these Amazonian groups that carry the highest frequencies of these introgressed alleles and their inbreeding and small population sizes are all factors that led them to have such a high prevalence of them. However, I wonder if another factor was at play: Denisovans lived in that region and encountered humans there, admixing in that area with them. After all it is a kind of cul-de-sac in the Amazonian rainforest nowadays, why wouldn't it have been one for the Denisovans? They also seem to have thrived in the jungles of Indonesia, and the Philippines in Southeast Asia.

The comparison between different groups within America, outside of America, and archaics, didn't detect any "correlation... between Australasian and Neanderthal... or Denisovan affinity... By contrast, Neanderthal and Denisovan affinities were strongly correlated... consistent with homogeneous archaic ancestry in the founding populations."

This is interesting because the Australasian signal is independent from the two archaic introgressions. This suggests that the Denisovans and Neanderthals that admixed with the first Amerindians were different from those who admixed with Australasians (including the Onge people and the Hòabìnhian people from Laos).

The authors wondered if the Australasian-Amerindian similarity was due to "shared archaic ancestry" but when the checked the introgression from Denisovans and Neanderthals in both groups, they found a "minimal overlap of 0.4%, corresponding to 11 genes/genomic regions... This minimal overlap indicates that the Ypykuéra ancestry is unlikely to have been derived from a known archaic hominin." (This is not clear, what do they mean by "a known archaic hominin"?)

The paper did find a "shared ancestry component between Indigenous Americans and Australasians that extends deep into the past." So this shared ancestry probably came from a similar modern human group, yet, as mentioned further up, the ancestors of the Amerindians split from other H. sapiens 15 to 70,000 years ago. I favor the older date. But, intriguingly, these people did not admix with the same Denisovans or Neanderthals that the Australasians bred with!

This could be explained by a split in this basal Homo sapiens: one group went into Australasia and admixed there with a group of Denisovans, the other headed north into East Asia mixing with other Denisovans, and eventually reached America. However, why is there no presence of other East Asian signals in Amerindians? This leads to a second alternative: the admixture event between Denisovans and the modern human ancestors of Amerindians took place inside America?

The map below outlines this possibility, with the Denisovans splitting from the Neanderthals somewhere in the South Caucasus, and moving into East Asia along different routes, a northern one to Altai, and then Tibet and East Asia, another along South Asia, and South East Asia into the Philippines and Papua New Guinea. Another hypothetical route could have led them across Siberia into America. Their last stand was in the Tropical Amazon region. They seemed to thrive in all types of climate, from icy siberia and Altai, to the highlands of Tibet, and the jungles of Sundaland and Sahul. America offers all of them: Cold Alaska, Canada and Northern USA, Patagonia, high mountains and plateaus in Bolivia and Peru, as well as along the Andes in Chile and Argentina, and of course the Jungles east of the Andes from Colombia, Venezuela and Bolivia to Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall © 

April 2026 study on the diversity of Amerindian genes & Austronesian admixing

Several studies have reported an Austronesian component in Native Americans, and I have mentioned this in various posts. A recent paper published on April 22, 2026 in Nature (Castro e Silva, M.A., Nunes, K., Ribeiro, M.R. et al. The evolutionary history and unique genetic diversity of Indigenous Americans. Nature 653, 134–145 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10406-w) explores these matters as well as the diversity, ages, distribution, and population waves ov the people that peopled America.

In the abstract, the authors point out that Native Americans "harbour extensive and previously uncharacterized genetic diversity" and attribute it to "at least three dispersals into South America". They also suggest that natural selection has acted on Neanderthal, Denisovan, and ancient Australasian alleles because they conferred adaptative advantages.

An imporant finding is the Australasian signal: "Notably, several genomic regions exhibit a remarkable allele sharing with Australasian populations, probably originating from an ancient admixture event and partly maintained by selection for more than 10,000 years."

Diversity

The paper says that scholars in general believe that America is "less genetically diverse than other continental human groups" (due to the Beringian bottleneck, founding effects and the European and African slave trade admixtures, however in this study they found new single-nucleotide variants (SNVs), roughly 11,000 new variants per individual, which, although lower than the African level of 27.800 per person is very similar to that of the Oceanians.

The paper states that "despite lower overall diversity, Indigenous Americans carry many previously unreported variants. This reflects both substantial genetic variation and long-standing underrepresentation in genomic resources." One measure of lack of diversity caused by isolation and small founder populations which lead to inbreeding. This is seen in the genome by a higher number of runs of homozygosity (ROHs). However, the expected higher ROH due to "serial bottlenecks following entry into the Americas" was not observed, because ROH does not show any "significant correlation with geographic distance from Alaska, longitude or latitude." Instead there were hotspots with high ROH in specific regions of the Americas, such as areas around the Amazonia in Brazil, Bolivia, and Peru.

Ancient Splits

The split from other Old World people is ancient, definitively pre-Clovis, and in my opinion, the older boundary is really ancient, suggesting an early peopling of America: "Cross-coalescence rate estimates (Methods) show that Indigenous American populations, grouped by genetic cluster, diverged from other continental groups between about 70,000 and 15,000 years ago." I mean the 70 ky limit. Very old indeed!

A Replacement 9,000 years ago

The paper mentions that some 9 kya a new genetic lineage sperad across Central America and the Caribbean, reaching South America and affected groups that still exist, like the Quechua of the Peruvian and Bolivian highlands, and the Tehuelche of Pataonia. These people partially replaced ancient lineages older than 9 kya. Then came a third wave around 1,300 years ago.

North American natives are very different "Indigenous North American populations are the most genetically distinct from South American groups."

Mapuches and the Amazon

Interestingly the paper finds that although the Tehuelche people of Patagonia have managed to retain their original genomic makeup, they "derive most ancestry from a Chaco sister branch (third dispersal)", and a similar effect is noticed among the Quechua. I have posted about a possible Southern Amazonian or Chacoan origin for the Mapuche people (see here and here), who live between Quechua and Tehuelches, and who have admixed with modern Tehuelches. The recent arrival of a Guarani component into the Mapuche could account for their similar myths and legendary beasts. This paper with its 3rd-wave seems to support this notion.

Affinity with Australasians

The similarity between genes of some Native Americans and contemporary Australasians has been explained as follows: the ancestors of Amerindians admixed in the distant past with some ancient archaic Asian people, known as Ypykuéra (a Tupi word meaning "Ancestors") or "Y" population, which is "partially related to a sister clade of present-day Australasians." (see my post and this one too).

The study found that the highest affinity with Australasians was centered in the Chaco Region, eastern and western South American as well as the Southwestern Amazon region (Paraguay, Bolivia, Northern Argentina, and South-southeastern Brazil. It is found among the Giarani, Surui, Awaj&uactue;, Ayoreo, Karitiana, Sirionó amd Tsimané people. It dates back to an ancient sample found in Sumidouro, Brazil, 10,400 years old. It increased from there on, "especially in the Andes, Pacific Coast and western South America." But the Pacific area, despite suggesting a transoceanic contact is disregarded by the authors, who instead prefer to support the idea that "this ancestry was present during the initial peopling of America and that it may have contributed more strongly to Late Holocene and present-day genetic diversity".

They tested if the Australasian link was due to introgression of archaics, like Neanderthals and Denisovans. This makes sense, Oceanian people have a high contribution of Denisovan ancestry. But, "No correlation was detected between Australasian and Neanderthal or Denisovan affinity. By contrast, Neanderthal and Denisovan affinities were strongly correlated, consistent with homogeneous archaic ancestry in the founding populations" In other words, the Neanderthal and Denisovan component of Amerindians is not linked to Australasians. So my suggestions in this post and this one, are not valid.

They also rejected the idea that the similarity with Australasians is due to isolation, where different groups retained the "Y" component. Isolation, marked by higher ROHs is not linked to Australasian affinity or inbreeding. Furthermore, those natives with higher ROH, and higher inbreeding have low Australasian affinity.

They also tested the link between the ancient Southeast Asian people, the Hòabìnhian people, and compared them with two samples of this population, La368 and La364. They found "significant correlations for La368 and La364. These results support a shared ancestry component between Indigenous Americans and Australasians that extends deep into the past." A short, laconic, explains-nothing phrase. How does the signal reach America? See my post on the H&oagrave;abìnhian and Austronesians here.

Finally the low prevalence 1-3% of Y genes in Amerindians suggests that at least some of these alleles were positively selected for and maintained over the past 10,000 years: "these findings indicate that several genomic regions sharing alleles with present-day Australasians were probably targets of positive selection. The candidate genes in these loci participate in critical biological processes that may have shaped the health and adaptive history of Indigenous American populations. However, positive selection seems to have acted on only a subset of Ypykuéra ancestry loci, whereas the remaining regions show no evidence of selection and are probably shaped by neutral evolutionary processes."

Conclusion

There is an Austronesian imprint in Amerindians, but we don't know why. The Native American people are diverse, and ROHs are not a sign of lack of diversity due to bottlenecks. Mapuche people have a recent 1,300 year-old ancestry from Guarani people. Deeper research and more samples will show a clearer picture.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall © 

Molina on the "engraved stones": Oceanian (Polynesians) in Patagonia

In the past, I have posted (see below for some links to these posts) about the strange engraved stones that were discovered in different parts of Chubut province, Patagonia, during the 20th century, and which were sent to the Salesian Museum in Rawson (their Facebook page), Chubut, and are exhibited there. See these pictures from their Facebook, they show the "engraved stones": Picture 1, Picture 2.

In his book "Patagonica" (online here), Father Manuel Jesús Molina mentions these stones and includes them as plates in his publication. Below are these images and his original captions are translated in each image's caption-

But first, let's read his interpretation of these engraved stones:

"Sculpture style - They are works executed in counter- and bas-relief on stone slabs of very different materials: granodiorite, granite, compact basalt, marble, sandstone, quartz pophyry. They have sulpted human figures seen from the front, and profile, animals, and birds, sometimes forming scenes; weapons and work tools; signs can be seen in the inscriptions that appear to be letters, the phases of the moon, and a symbolic sign that give mental uniformity to the works. In general they have a frame of lines or frets... Decorated (or not), axes and the oquewa [sic] belong to it... With this style is the engraved ceramic of Patagonia, especially in Chubut. The Rawson Museum preserves a slab of stone on which they have reproduced in basrelief different shapes of ceramic objects with their respective decorations. With them, came the engraved plaques, done many times on soft materials like volcanic tuffs. All this makes us suppose that this style is of oceanic origin as shown by the symbolic cross-shaped sign of its bearers. The painted skulls of San Blas would also belong to it, which bear the same magical sign that is seen among the oceanic creatures of the Marquesas Islands, and is engraved on the back of the mythical lizard and painted in red in a dotted circle at Punta Gualicho, in Lake Argentino. An old Alakulup tradition says that long ago, some very bad men arrived in large canoes. Their bodies were painted with large stripes, and they killed everyone they encountered. Surely, their gateway must have been Puerto Aysén; they must have crossed the Andes through Coyhaique and reached Lake Colue Huapi via the Mayo and Senguerr rivers, where they established their settlement. There they mixed with the Patagonians and reached the coast, which they traveled as far as the Paraná River, where they formed the Canals Frau Littoral Group. It can be dated to around 500 AD."

The Engraved Stones and their Captions

From Molina's book Patagónica Figures 70 to 79:

70 - Sculpture style: small bust whose pedestal exhibits sculpted emblems on its four faces - Salesian Museum of Rawson No. 737
71 - Sculpted art: small bust with an engraved pedestal with emblems on its four faces - Salesian Museum of Rawson No. 737

72- Three sculptures: in th emiddle, a "Mature Mere" with sculpted effigy and signs of 27x9 cm; to the left a trapezoidal slab of prophyrite of 26x19 cm with ostriches and their chicks; to the right a basaltic stone of 23x18 cm with an indigenous effigy and its emblems - Salesian Museum of Rawson, N. 752, 738, 751

73- Boulder with the figure of a strange animal represented with only two legs, inscription, emblems and frets - Salesian Museum of Rawson, No.742

74 - Three sculptures: in the middle a porphyrite axe of 20x14 cm found in chullucurá; to the right, cross with double border and emblems, in white marble of 14x12x4 cm found in Puerto Visser; to the left, oval with the portrait of a native, 15x12 cm - Salesian Museum of Rawson, N. 748, 746, 747

75 - Guanaco that looks at you on dark shale of 43x36 cm, with various emblems, the condor and a serpent. - Salesian Museum of Rawson, No. 743

76 - Black basalt slab of 54x29 cm with a perimetral border: a collection of naitve artifacts and emblems: the hunter wears a loincloth. - Salesian Museum of Rawson, No. 736

77- Various artifacts and emblems

78 - Axe in basalt with inscription and red paint. - Patagones, collection of Mrs. Julia M. De Serrano

79- Oceanic artifacts: 1. Okewa, of 27x13x3.6 cm (n. 204); 2. Okewa, of 18.5x 10.6x2 cm (n. 1297); 3. Triangular axe, of 18x14.5x2 cm (n. 1300). - Fancisco de Viedma Museum, Patagones

Okewa

When Molina mentions "Oceanic" he is referring to the Polynesians. The "oquewa" ini the text (sic) and "okewa" pictured above are the words used to designate polished rock clubs used by certain Polynesian groups such as the Maoris of New Zealand. They can also be found under different names, and made in wood, in different islands across the Polynesia.

In a future post we will look into the ceremonial clubs found in the Americas that hint at a Polynesian link or visit to the New World.

Visitors from the West

Molina mentions an ancient myth of the Alakaluf about canoes full of men painted with stripes that murdered their people. These myths could refer to European ships or expeditions from Chile southwards along the Pacific coastline which usually ended up with the Europeans killing the natives. A big canoe could equally be a Polynesian vessel or a European caravel or galleon. Bodies painted with large stripes could refer to clothes (the Alakaluf people just wore some seal skins).

My previous posts on these stones

The "Phoenician" stones were definitively not made by native Tehuelche or Mapuche people, they are very different. And we can therefore conclude that they are either:

• Fake. A forgery, a hoax. That is: someone deliberately crafted these stones with "native" motifs, with the intention of making them appear as authentic native or Phoenician crafts (hence the use of Semitic letters), to sell them to gullible amateur archaeologists.
• Genuine, made by some non-native people like European settlers. By genuine I mean that the persons who made them, did so for some religious, cultural, social reason, and left them behind when they returned to their homeland or disappeared (famine, illness, war). Probably some were made and sold for a profit, to fool those who bought them believing they were genuine native handicrafts.

The posts on these stones:
Tehuelche rock inscriptions. Comparison to "Phoenician" stones.
Phoenicians, Tehuelches, Patagonia and cryptozoology - Part 1 where I asked if "are they genuine or are they forgeries? If genuine, were they carved by the Tehuelche natives? or by someone else?"
Genuine Tehuelche "inscribed or engraved" stones
Analysis of Tehuelche - Phoenician - Celtic (?) intertwined snakes : Strange snakes of alleged Celtic or Phoenician origin found engraved on Patagonian rockss. Native or Semitic - Celtic art?
Cryptid on Phoenician - Tehuelche carving, a cryptid on a Tehuelche engraved stone with Phoenician symbols. (" a very peculiar stone which differs from the standard native artistic expression.")
Phoenicians and Hebrews in Pre-Columbian Patagonia

An Article on the Stones

The issue No. 171, of Argentina Austral, published in September 1945, (online here, see p.12) included an article "¿Eran nómades o sedentarios los Tehuelches?" (Were the Tehuelche nomads or sedentary?) by Father Justo M. Ducco. In it, he discusses these engraved stones, and includes more photographs of them, including more samples such as a tortoise in pink granite (pictured below).

The article mentions the stone sculptures as follows (In it, Ducco, interviews Father Antonio F. Fernández, principal of the Rawson Salesian School, which served at that time as the "museum"):

"But what gives this Museum its unique character is the "Archaeological Collection," with its lithoglyphs that intrigue the observer. A dozen or more granite-porphyry plaques, exquisitely engraved in relief, with heads of indigenous people, animals of the region, tools, symbols, and probable inscriptions, surrounded by a geometric border like a fretwork. The stone chosen for these works is solid and fine-grained; diverse in color and composition. And there is an exception, a small marble plaque less than two square decimeters in diameter. [2 dm = 200cm² = 31 sq.in.] The engraving, or at least its retouching, was executed by percussion with pointed stones, with the patience necessary to achieve impeccable forms and surfaces. Father Fernández tells me that other visitors, more or less dedicated to archaeological matters, expressed their fears that these lithoglyphs may have been brought from Peru in ancient times; or perhaps they are local works by European carvers. I spoke at length with the Father; we examined the plaques and other similar works repeatedly, including a small bust of an indigenous person; we exchanged opinions, suppositions, difficulties, and arguments; and finally, we synthesized our shared opinion in several statements, which I present and elaborate upon here.
1°) The objects are heavy, some of the plaques weighing up to thirty kilos, and the Father has seen some of even greater proportions. We therefore dismiss the suspicion of allochthonous origin, taking into consideration that during the time of their long migrations, the indigenous people lacked vehicles that would have allowed them to carry more than the bare necessities.
2°) Regarding the hypothesis of the European origin of these sculptures, we note first that not all of them contain a single example of an exotic theme. If Europeans had engraved or simply directed the engravings, they would have imprinted their concerns as foreigners on them.
3°) Nor does the horse appear among the animal figures, which can only be explained by accepting that these are productions from a time before the arrival of the Spaniards to our shores; since with the first founding of Buenos Aires, the wild cattle descended from the escaped or abandoned cattle already began to spread towards the pampas.
4°) None of the plaques have a symmetrical face, even if only approximately. Their creators were aware of symmetry, as evidenced by the perfection with which they reproduced the Indian heads seen frontally in low relief, with their fringed headbands and geometrically arranged necklaces; likewise, the turtles, arrows, and other naturally symmetrical motifs. But they were not concerned with symmetry as European or Europeanized artists were; therefore, the outline of the work, traced by a simple fretwork, and the distribution of the figures, lack intentional symmetry.
5°) The works show the work of different hands, as can be seen from the compositions, the details of their execution, and even more so from the fact that the sculptures were found in different, very distant locations. At first glance, the themes might seem repetitive, were it not for the fact that the objects typical of the Patagonian moorland were specifically few: rheas, guanacos, pumas, snakes, lizards, the sun, the four phases of the moon... and add to that two almost indispensable symbols: arrows, such as those found in the riding arenas in their most common and elegant form; and another symbol that leaves us intrigued: Something like a uniform club or a bundle of rods, with two radiating bows or ties, also uniform and without a terminal notch, the whole of which resembles a crude schematization of a lizard's body seen from above. To these elements of the sculptural compositions, we must add several small signs that appear to be hieroglyphs. And there is precisely one plaque that contains about twenty of them, as if it were a mnemonic or learning manual.
6°) It will be objected that, since these were "nomadic" Indians, we cannot attribute to them the perfection displayed by the carvers of these stones."

Next Post: Okewa in the Americas

In a future post I will explore the presence of these okewa in the Americas.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2025by Austin Whittall © 

EDAR in ancient Amerindians and modern ones - 2025 update

The ectodysplasin A receptor (EDAR) gene, which is also known as rs3827760; 370V/A (where the V and the A represent Valine and Alanine, two aminoacids) or 1540T/C (where T and C are two nucleotides Thymine and Cytosine respectively) has an impact on tooth shape, hair thickness, sweat glands, and milk production and breasts in women. It is also found almost exclusively in Asian and Native American populaitons. It is extremely rare in Africa and Europe who carry the "ancestral" variant the 370V. The derived or mutated allele, where the Alanine was replaced for Valine in the protein or Thymine for Cytosine in the DNA strand, is a "recent" mutation known as 370A.

I have posted about it, when I mentioned that an ancient Amerindian from Brazil, a the Lapa do Santo individual who died over 6,000 years ago, carried the ancestral variant. Which is odd, since his ancestors came from Asia, and the derived variant is predominant there. This variant is also predominant among current Native Americans.

The question is: How could he have the original ancestral unmutated version while the other natives have the derived version? What about the bottle necks and founder effects, the Beringian standstill and so forth? These "filters" are supposed to have narrowed down the genetic variability in America, only a few mtDNA and Y-Chromosome haplogroups managed to enter America. So, with these limiations, wouldn't we expect all ancient Native Americans to carry the mutated Asian variant with them into America?

Posth et al. (2018) were the first to point out this anomaly:

"EDAR gene Variant. Our data show that a variant in EDAR that affects tooth shape, hair follicles and thickness, sweat, and mammary gland ductal branching and that occurs at nearly 100% frequency in present day Native Americans and East Asians was not fixed in USR1, Anzick-1, a Brazil Lapa do Santo 9600 BP individual and a Brazil Laranjal 6700 BP individual, all of whom carry the ancestral allele. Thus, the derived allele rose in frequency in parallel in both East Asians and in Native Americans."

These ancient American remains mentioned by Posth are old: the USR1 baby was 11,500 years old, Anzic-1 ~12,900 years old, the Brazilian dates are given above.

Yet the derived (mutated) form was present in the ancient site of Los Rieles "(12.0 kya) from coastal Chile of South America." (source), and the same source states that the mutated form increased to a frequency of 90% by the Early Holocene in both East Asia and America (11.6 - 5.0 kya). Posth et al. give the Los Rieles site a younger age of 10.9 kya, and confirms it had a mutated variant (See the Table 7 in Posth's Supplementary Material with a site by site detail).

Posth explains this anomaly by suggesting that the derived EDAR was not yet fixed at that time and that it evolved later, in some kind of convergent evolution on both sides of the Pacific. Probably promoted by natural selection.

A newer paper by Xiaowei Mao et al., (2021) from which the following image was taken, discusses ancient remains from the Amur River region, it also mentions EDAR.

Fig 4B. EDAR alleles. Source

The image above is captioned "(B) Allele counts for adaptive mutations of EDAR V370A in Tianyuan, ancient populations in the Amur region, and recently published ancient northern East Asians (Yumin, Bianbian, Boshan, Xiaogao, and Xiaojingshan) (Yang et al., 2020) from 40–6 ka. Purple shading represents the period of the LGM. Dots represent genotype calls (blue, ancestral alleles; red, derived alleles; gray, missing alleles). The number at the top of the bar (separated by a comma) shows the allele coverage for the derived and ancestral allele, and the number in parentheses at the bottom of the bar shows the number of individuals included in that time column. Genotypes were called using a maximum-likelihood-based method (snpAD) that takes into account possible errors in the covered alleles."

The text adds that "here we show that mutation V370A in the EDAR gene appeared in all ancient East Asians (including AR19K), except for AR33K and Tianyuan, the only two individuals in our sample predating the LGM stadial in East Asia." So it was not present in the 34.3-32.4 cal BP AR33K specimen from the Amur River area or the older Tianyuan man (40 ky old). It developed later. Remember that it was not found in ancient Amerindians either.

The paper adds that "our direct observation demonstrated that this allele emerged as early as ∼19 ka, as observed in the AR19K individual (Figure 4B), providing an older and more accurate upper boundary for the allelic age estimate." Then it spreads quickly reaching 93.7% in Asia nowadays.

Prevous estimates from 2008 (online source) reported a later date of fixation of 370A, some 10,740 years ago, it also suggested that "370A was likely at high frequency before the colonization of the Americas 10,500–14,000 years ago. Thus, the high frequency of 370A in Native Americans is most likely due to positive selection prior to migrations from Asia to America."

These explanations suggest that the derived allele was already present in the people who populated America.

But why is it not found in the other old remains? Some would argue that the first people to reach America carried the ancestral and the derived variants, and that eventually the later replaced the former. I believe that these people came from a group that carried the Ancestral allele, so this places them before the LGM, say 30 or 40 kya. Then came the post LGM migration with the mutated allele and erased all of the previous original Americans.

Another explanation lies with the Australasians: A 2021 paper on the genetics ancient Asians reported that none of the 7 ancient Jomon samples (Jomon hunter-gatherers lived in Japan) dated to ~2500–800 BC carried the derived allele. The Jomon were assimilated by the a later wave of people who now make up the Japanese population. The Ainu of Northern Japan are realated to the Jomon, and these, in turn, seem to have reached Japan using a coastal route, linking them to Southeast Asian people like tue Taiwan aborigines (Ami, and Atayal) and the Igorot, all of which are Austronesian minorities. (source). This coastal migration from ASEAN to Japan could also link them with the Onge, who only carry the ancestral allele.

Could Onge-related people have carried the ancestral allele into America in a first peopling wave, and in the process leave their genetic imprint there?

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2025 by Austin Whittall © 

The Australasian and Denisovan admixture in Amerindians

A paper published in 2022 (Campelo dos Santos Andre Luiz, Owings Amanda, Sullasi Henry Socrates Lavalle, Gokcumen Omer, DeGiorgio Michael and Lindo John (2022). Genomic evidence for ancient human migration routes along South America's Atlantic coast. Proc. R. Soc. B.28920221078 http://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2022.1078) reported the genomes of two ancient paleoindians from Northeastern Brazil, on the Atlantic coastal region and placed them in the context of other South American specimens.

The authors report that "...we also detect greater Denisovan than Neanderthal ancestry in ancient Uruguay and Panama individuals. Moreover, we find a strong Australasian signal in an ancient genome from Panama".

Australasian signal

The paper indicates that "A strong signal of Australasian ancestry, previously reported only for the Lagoa Santa individual and present-day Surui, was also observed for the previously published PAPV173, from Panama. The Piapoco, Surui and Karitiana, however, harbour high affinities with Brazil-2 and thus may have received contributions coming from Central America (in the form of the Australasian signal, in a north-to-south directionality) and South America's Atlantic coast (in a south-to-north directionality)."

The PAPV173 individual from Panama also harbored a very high proportion of Denisovan genes (see map below) while in the rest of South America the opposite is true: they have a higher proportion of Neanderthal to Denisovan ancestry. Why?

In the map below, the "Pie chart radius reflects the proportion of shared archaic loci in the individual."

Genetic components (Fig. 2). Source

An article pulbished on the Florida Atlantic University news site (some of the authors are researchers at the FAU) includes some comments by the authors

"“There is an entire Pacific Ocean between Australasia and the Americas, and we still don’t know how these ancestral genomic signals appeared in Central and South America without leaving traces in North America,” said Andre Luiz Campelo dos Santos, Ph.D., first author, an archaeologist and a postdoctoral fellow in FAU’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
To further add to the existing complexity, researchers also detected greater Denisovan than Neanderthal ancestry in ancient Uruguay and Panama individuals. Denisovans are a group of extinct humans first identified from DNA sequences from the tip of finger bone discovered around 2008.
“It’s phenomenal that Denisovan ancestry made it all the way to South America,” says John Lindo, Ph.D., a co-corresponding author of the article who specializes in ancient DNA analysis and is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Emory University. “The admixture must have occurred a long time before, perhaps 40,000 years ago. The fact that the Denisovan lineage persisted and its genetic signal made it into an ancient individual from Uruguay that is only 1,500 years old suggests that it was a large admixture event between a population of humans and Denisovans.”"

Unanswered questions

Is the Australasian signal an artifact of the models and computer analysis programs? Does the Denisovan genetic content indicate a link to Austronesians? (There is a high Denisovan content among people in that region). Why do the ancient South American natives have a higher proportion of Neanderthal than Denisovan content?

A recent paper published on Oct. 20, 2025 (An early East Asian lineage with unexpectedly low Denisovan ancestry, Yang, Jiaqi et al., Current Biology, Volume 35, Issue 20, 4898 - 4908.e4) found that the 40,000 year-old Tianyuan had the highest Denisovan genetic admixture among ancient Asians: "Among individuals from continental Eurasia, we find the highest proportion of detectable Denisovan ancestry in Tianyuan (∼0.25%), while other pre-LGM individuals from Eastern Eurasia had lower levels of Denisovan ancestry, comparable to those of later East Asians and Siberians."

It also noted that the Laos Hoabinhian hunter-gatherers also have high levels of Denisovan admixture "we found more Denisovan ancestry in the Hoabinhian individual La36846 than in the Jomon individuals, with the Hoabinhian individual carrying more segments covering a larger part of the genome." However, they report that "our results support the existence of a deep modern human lineage in East Asia with limited, if any, Denisovan ancestry, suggesting that at least one early East Asian lineage was not in contact, or in limited contact, with Denisovans. This implies different dispersals for modern humans into East Asia and suggests that Denisovans were sparsely distributed in the region."

The Panama sample PAPV173 is only 520-650 years BP yet it still carries a very high Denisovan signal, could this link it to the ancient Tianyuan man? The other South Americans have a lower signal, perhaps diluted by admixture with other groups of Asians who arrived later and had the limited contact suggested by Yang's paper?

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2025by Austin Whittall © 

On Neanderthals in America and the Out of China Hypothesis

A very interesting paper by the controversial Shi Huang, published in 2017 (On the peopling of the Americas: molecular evidence for the Paleoamerican and the Solutrean models. Dejian Yuan, Shi Huang. bioRxiv 130989; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/130989).

Shi proposed the Maximum Genetic Diversity (MGD) theory to explain evolution and how species diversify. It addresses the concerns raised by the "molecular clock" and also concepts like "junk DNA", "neutral mutations", epigenetic effects, etc.

In this paper he looks into the origin of Native Americans, and does so with his "Out of Asia" outlook.

Shi suggests an old date, earlier than currently accepted, and even hints at the feasibility of Neanderthals entering America before modern humans!

"The timing of first entry into America by humans remains to be estimated by future DNA studies. Several human sites in America, including the Topper site in South Carolina United States, the Burnham site in Oklahoma United States, sites in Brazil and Chile, suggest that humans were in the New world as early as 30,000 years ago to perhaps 60,000 56. This old age for the first settlement is consistent with the findings here that ancient Amerindians had more ancestry from Southern Chinese (Hunan) relative to Northern Chinese (Fujian), the recent finding of modern humans originating in South East Asia, and the African or Australo-Melanesian like genome in Paleoamericans or Native Americans that could only have come from Neanderthals (30). Also compatible with results here is the recent discovery of a ∼130000 year old human site in North America (60), indicating that admixture of Neanderthals and modern humans might have happened in America, which appears to be the more likely model given the absence of Amerindian mtDNA C1, C4c and D1 haplotypes in North East Asia and Siberia that shared more informative alleles with Neanderthals than their respective sister haplotypes in North East Asia and Siberia (30). If Neanderthals were present in North East Asia and Siberia, there seems a priori no reason that they could not find their way through the Bering Strait."

The paper he cites as "(30)" is: Yuan, D. et al. Modern human origins: multiregional evolution of autosomes and East Asia origin of Y and mtDNA. bioRxiv, doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/106864 (2017).Google Scholar, where Shi is a coauthor.

This paper has boldly proclaims in its abstract "We found evidence of modern Y and mtDNA originating in East Asia and dispersing via hybridization with archaic humans. Analyses of autosomes, Y and mtDNA all suggest that Denisovan and Neanderthal were archaic Africans with Eurasian admixtures and ancestors of South Asia Negritos and Aboriginal Australians. Verifying our model, we found more ancestry of Southern Chinese from Hunan in Africans relative to other East Asian groups examined. These results suggest multiregional evolution of autosomes and replacements of archaic Y and mtDNA by modern ones originating in East Asia, thereby leading to a coherent account of modern human origins."

I must confess that I find the arguments rather vague, and some explanation regarding "slow" and "fast" SNPs would come in handy. I am no expert in this field and I guess most scholars don't consider his maximum genetic diversity (MGD) hypothesis seriously. The authors could have added more context to interpret their findings, which to them seem obvious, but not to me. Shi's X (Twitter) profile has a link to the MGD website, where he explains how it works (and includes a list with all of his publications).

Nevertheless, I do give them credit for this paper that boldly goes against the current prevailing consensus and pushes against the Out Of Africa hypothesis with strong arguments.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2025by Austin Whittall © 

On the Australasian imprint in Paleoindians (Part 2)

See part 1 here

This post continues my analysis on how did the Australasian genetic imprint (from Southeast Asia and the Andaman Islands) reach the ancient Amerindians and current tribes in the Amazon and NW Peruvian coast without leaving any traces in the North American Natives, ancient North Amerindian remains, or their Beringian ancestors.

I thought it would be pretty straightforward, but it isn't. The genetics of the Late Pleistocene in Asia are not simple. There were several groups there around 50,000 years ago, and the current populations don't reflect the situation at that time.

Assuming Out of Africa as correct, it seems that humans moved across Asia and diversified into different "Basal" populations.

Tianyuan Man

Genetic analysis of a male found in Northern China, close to Beijing, in the Tianyuan cave, confirmed he had 4-5% of Neanderthal introgression. He was dated at 41,000 years ago. "three South American populations—the Surui and Karitiana in Brazil (“Amazonians”) and the Chane in northern Argentina and southern Bolivia—share more alleles with the Tianyuan individual than other Native American populations do." (source), these Amazonians are the ones with the Australasian imprint. The paper adds that "we find that the Amazonians can be described as a mixture of other Native American populations and 9%–15% of an ancestral population related to the Tianyuan individual, the Papuan, or the Onge (SE 4%–10%)." So here we add another "ancient" Asian component to the Australasian imprint, the Tianyuan man's genes.

The paper reasons that "The fact that the Tianyuan individual, who lived in mainland Asia about 40,000 years ago, has affinities to some South American populations that is as strong as or stronger than that observed for the Papuan and Onge suggests that a population related to the Tianyuan individual, as well as to the present-day Papuan and Onge, was once widespread in eastern Asia. This group or another Asian population related to this group persisted at least until the colonization of the Americas and contributed to the genomes of some Native American populations."

A 2025 paper found that "Among individuals from continental Eurasia, we find the highest proportion of detectable Denisovan ancestry in Tianyuan (∼0.25%), while other pre-LGM individuals from Eastern Eurasia had lower levels of Denisovan ancestry, comparable to those of later East Asians and Siberians."

Onge and Hòabìnhian

The Onge from the Andaman Islands are Australasians, and their signal is found in the Amazonian tribes. They were part of a basal population in Southeast Asia, a 2022 paper includes the following map showing a possible entry route into the area, and the current levels of this ancient basal component. Note how high it is in some areas.

Basal Asians. Fig. 2 in Deng et al. (2022)

The paper continues: " We speculate this basal Asian (bASN) ancestry to be an ancient lineage... the bASN ancestry is negatively correlated with the Altai Neanderthal introgression in Asian populations... suggesting that the peopling of Asia might have occurred prior to the Altai Neanderthal introgression (directly or indirectly) to the modern human populations in this region." Which makes sense, the Neanderthals lived in the colder central and NW regions of Asia, and possibly in NE Asia. So the people that moved along the coast of Southern and SE Asia didn't encounter Neanderthals on their journey.

An extremely interesting paper by Silcocks & Dunstan (2023) on dispersal of humans and two strains of tuberculosis across Asia finds a similar distribution of ancient people in Asia, the basal one in SE Asia, a later wave in northern and central Asia. (map below from the paper).

!--image captions-->

Original caption: "Fig. 7: Our proposed model of human-Mtb co-expansion, including population dispersal trajectories, and the predominant Mtb and Y-chromosome lineages they carried.". Source

A paper published in Science by McColl et al., (2018) indicates that there are "at least four ancient populations [in Asia] The oldest layer consists of mainland Hòabìnhians (group 1), who share ancestry with present-day Andamanese Önge, Malaysian Jehai, and the ancient Japanese Ikawazu Jōmon." The paper includes the following map, which shows an even older migration (black arrows) heading norteast to Tianyuan and southeast into Sahul, Papua New Guinea and Australia. The Onge and Hòabìnhians split later (red arrows).

Original Caption: Fig. 4 Model for plausible migration routes into SEA. This schematic is based on ancestry patterns observed in the ancient genomes. Because we do not have ancient samples to accurately resolve how the ancestors of Jōmon and Japanese populations entered the Japanese archipelago, these migrations are represented by dashed arrows. A mainland component in Indonesia is depicted by the dashed red-green line. Gr, group; Kra, Kradai. Fig. 4 McColl et al.

A similar route is suggested by Larena et al. (2021) which analyzes the genetics of the Philippine population. It mentions a first wave of human beings that reachied Sundaland (at that time it was not submerged) and peopled Australia, Papua New Guinea, the Indonesian Islands, the Philippines, and Andaman Islands around 50,000 years ago. This basal group put the Negrito people in the Philippines. Below is Fig. 2A from the paper, where I have added these place names and the comment on the exposed continental shelf

This wave comprised "Paleolithic hunter-gatherer groups, linked genetically to the Basal Australasian branch of modern humans"" it led to the Negritos, PNG people and Australian Aboriginal people, and also, in Southern China to another basal group, shown in the image above, the "Basal East Asian".

These Basal East Asians could have moved along the Pacific coast, northwards into Japan, and the Siberian coast, reaching America with their Onge genetic imprint. Moving along the coast of North America they didn't leave an imprint in its interior. Then, when they reached South America they moved inland. Plausible, but strange.

I have not yet found a paper with a convincing explanation of the "Gap" in Beringia, ancient North American and Mesoamerican paleoindians and most of the later Amerindians in the continent.

False Signal?

A study published in 2018 by Posth et al. failed to find the Population Y signal:

"We tested for this signal in the ancient South American individuals with statistics of the form f4(Mbuti, Australasian; X, Mixe or ancient South American), and while we replicated the originally reported signal when X was present-day Karitiana or Surui, we could not detect a signal when X was any of the ancient South Americans (Table S6). We also studied the statistic f4(Mbuti, Tianyuan; Ancient1, Ancient2) to test if any ancient individual is differentially related to Tianyuan (Yang et al., 2017), but no statistic was significant (Table S6). We finally applied qpWave to all pairs of South American groups, testing whether they were homogeneously related to a set of diverse non-Native American outgroups (Mbuti, Han, Onge, French, and Papuan) and found no pair of ancient South Americans that consistently gave significant signals (p < 0.01), as expected if all the ancient South Americans we analyzed derived from the same stem Native American population (Table S6). Our failure to find significant evidence of Australasian or Paleolithic East Asian affinities in any of the ancient Central and South American individuals raises the question of what ancient populations could have contributed the Population Y signal in Surui and other Amazonian groups and increases the previously small chance that this signal—despite the strong statistical evidence for it—was a false-positive. A priority is to search for the Population Y signal in additional ancient genomes."

Another paper searched for the Population Y signal using f4 statistics: f4(Mbuti, Papuan/Onge/Australian; present-day Mexicans, ancient Brazilians). The authors noted that:

"The only ancient Brazilian group showing significant affinity to Onge, compared with present-day Mexicans, is the JabuticabeiraII_~2400BP group. The signal is mainly driven by one individual (JBT009—burial 38), but it remains for the entire group even after the exclusion of JBT009. Similarly, there is significant genetic attraction between Onge and one individual from the Cabeçuda_3200BP group (CBE004—burial 15), while all other tests do not reach values close to significance (Supplementary Data 7). However, no evidence of the Population Y signal is found in the recent Amazonian individual Palmeiras Xingu_500BP, despite the fact that this ancestry was first described in present-day Amazonian populations; or in Capelinha_10400BP, despite its association with the paleoamerican cranial morphology. We further tested the presence of differential affinity of ancient Brazilian individuals to present-day Papuans, Onge and Australians, as well as the 40,000-year-old Tianyuan genome-wide data from China using f4 statistics of the form f4(Mbuti, Papuan/Onge/Australian/Tianyuan; Ancient Brazilian A, Ancient Brazilian B). Only the JabuticabeiraII_~2400BP group reaches significant attraction to both Onge and Papuans, and only in comparison to LapaDoSanto_9600BP (ref. 63). This suggests either that the Population Y signal is equally widespread in most tested ancient individuals from Brazil or that previously reported attractions to non-American ancestries are exacerbated by the use of present-day Mexican populations in comparison to ancient groups (Supplementary Data 7)."

Modern Mexicans are a mixture of European and North American native people. It is reasonable that they are different from secluded Amazonian natives. The Mixe natives are North American, which lack this Population-Y signal. It does not appear to me that they "exacerbate" the population Y signal.

Posth et al. didn't detect it among the ancient samples they used, this does not mean it is a false positive, perhaps their sample did not include the members of this first peopling wave which was erased by later "ancient" people via Beringia, with Siberian genetic imprints.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2025 by Austin Whittall © 

On the Australasian imprint in Paleoindians (Part 1)

See part 2 here

In this post I am sharing text from a paper published in 2022 (Silva, M. A. C. e ., Ferraz, T., & Hünemeier, T.. (2022). A genomic perspective on South American human history. Genetics and Molecular Biology, 45(3), e20220078. https://doi.org/10.1590/1678-4685-GMB-2022-0078. Online) that summarizes the current (in 2022) knowledge about the peopling of South America, and provides early dates and information on the Australasian genetic imprint found there:

Taken together, the current archeological evidence supports that humans were present in the Americas at least 20 ka BP during the peak of the LGM (Ardelean et al., 2020; Bennett et al., 2021). Although the identity of these first Americans remains an open question, genetics has given us some insight into who they may have been, as revealed by the faint signal of shared ancestry with modern-day Australasian peoples (Skoglund et al., 2015; Castro e Silva et al., 2021). This data supports the hypothesis that the initial settlers were more closely related to the ancestors of modern Australasians than to those of East Asians and also implies that their contribution to post-LGM Native American populations was mostly absent and seldom minimal. In this scenario, these first human groups to reach the continent would have been later replaced by the ANA descendants, starting by the end of the LGM, and only rarely would have admixed with them. Furthermore, our recent findings show a lot of variation within populations (Castro e Silva et al., 2021), which suggests that some of these first Americans could have lived in relative isolation until very recently when admixed with SNA populations. Furthermore, most of the genetic contribution from these early ancestors might have been erased by the intense population dynamics during the Holocene and by the successive inflows of distinct SNA groups in the case of South America (Posth et al., 2018).
Considering that continental glaciers completely blocked northern North America throughout the LGM period, an early settlement of the Americas requires an alternate pathway. This alternative is provided by the so-called coastal migration theory (CMT) (Davis and Madsen, 2020), which proposes that the Pacific Rim shorelines were used as a route into the Americas from Asia by groups of humans adapted to a seaside lifestyle, likely based on the exploitation of the resourcefully rich environments of kelp forests present along both continents’ Pacific coasts (Erlandson et al., 2007). In that case, it could also help explain the absence of the Australasian signal in North America if the dispersal was rapid and mostly restricted along the Pacific coast, resulting in more significant population growth in South America at the expense of North America. Most interestingly new evidence points to the existence of a very large number of islands in the Bering Sea to the south of Beringia between 30 and 8 ka BP, named the Bering Transitory Archipelago (BTA), which would have greatly enhanced the availability of marine resources and also facilitated sea travel through more easily navigable and protected waters (Dobson et al., 2021).
Finally, some genetic and morphometric analyses of Northeastern and Southeastern Asians (NEA and SEA, respectively) provide some intriguing pieces of evidence on the origins of the Native American-Australasian connection. First, a link between the Onge and the ancient SEA hunter-gatherers, known as Hòabìnhians, is demonstrated by the genetic affinity between the Onge and two Hòabìnhians from Laos and Malaysia with approximately 8 and 4 ka BP (McColl et al., 2018), implying that the latter are closely related to the Onge’s ancestors. Second, morphological affinities between the Onge (a SEA population) and the NEA (Matsumura et al., 2019) support the hypothesis that a group closely linked to the Onge - thus also likely related to the Hòabìnhians - was involved in an admixture event with the ANA and thus responsible for the Australasian genetic affinity observed in indigenous Americans (Skoglund et al., 2015). There is also solid evidence that the distribution of modern-day Australasian and East Asian ancestors was significantly different across East Asia during the Pleistocene and that populations like the Jomon from Japan show very clear indications of a mixture of northern and southern Asian ancestries (McColl et al., 2018; Wang et al., 2020); this is particularly meaningful given that Japan is a likely candidate and the proposed birthplace of the First Americans in the CMT framework. These findings illustrate how important it is to comprehensively elucidate East Asian population history in order to grasp the full picture of the Americas’ peopling. "

Below is the map in Skoglund et al.'s 2015 paper regarding Australasian and Amerindian affinities.

Original image caption: heatmap of CHROMOPAINTER statistics. For non-Americans we display the symmetry statistic S(non-American; Mixe, Suruí & Karitiana) for donating as many haplotypes to Mixe as to Suruí & Karitiana. For the Americas we plot S(Onge; Mixe, American) for receiving as many haplotypes from the Onge as do the Mixe.. Fig 1 in Skoglund et al.

The Population-Y

Skoglund et al. 2015 paper discovered this Australasian signal. They write the following:

" we do find that a model where Amazonians receive ancestry from the lineage leading to the Andamanese fits the data in the sense that its predicted f4-statistics are all within 2 standard errors of statistics computed on the empirical data (Extended Data Figure 6; Extended Data Figure 7; Extended Data Table 3). These results do not imply that an unmixed population related anciently to Australasians migrated to the Americas. While this is a formal possibility, an alternative model that we view as plausible is that the ‘Population Y’ (we use ‘Population Y’ after Ypykuéra, which means ‘ancestor’ in the Tupi language family spoken by the Suruí and Kartiana) that contributed Australian related ancestry to Amazonians was already mixed with a lineage related to First Americans at the time it reached Amazonia. When we model such a scenario, we obtain a fit for models that specify 2%-85% of the ancestry of the Suruí, Karitiana, and Xavante as coming from Population Y (Figure 2). These results show that quite a high fraction of Amazonian ancestry today plausibly comes from Population Y. At the same time, the results constrain the fraction of Amazonian ancestry that comes from an Australasian related population (via Population Y) to a much tighter range of 1%-2% (Figure 2).
We have provided compelling evidence that a Population Y that has ancestry from a lineage more closely related to present-day Australasians than to present-day East Asians and Siberians, contributed a small fraction of the DNA of Native Americans from Amazonia and the Central Brazilian Plateau."

Onge people

You can see some Onge people in the following picutre (source):

These people in the Anadaman islands of the Gulf of Bengal, in the Indian Ocean close to both India and Myanmar, are among the oldest (if you accept the Out of Africa hypothesis) humans after H. sapiens left Africa, and lived in isolation on their insular territory.

Their dark African-like skin is convergent evolution to adapt to their tropical habitat.

How did it reach America and the Amazon?

A paper from 2021 analyzed the matter in depth (to validate its reality -the signal could have been an artifact in the tools used, that mistook a strong genetic drift in the Amazonian people it was found in, for an ancient Australasian imprint.

It confirmed it was a real signal: "Here, we show the Australasian genetic signal is present in the Pacific coast region, indicating a more widespread signal distribution within South America and implicating an ancient contact between Pacific and Amazonian dwellers. We demonstrate that the Australasian population contribution was introduced in South America through the Pacific coastal route before the formation of the Amazonian branch, likely in the ancient coastal Pacific/Amazonian population. In addition, we detected a significant amount of interpopulation and intrapopulation variation in this genetic signal in South America.."

The study found the signal not only in Amazonian Suruí and Karitiana, and also among people living on the NW Pacific Coast of Peru like the Sechura, Chotuna, and Narihuala. The authors conclude that "Our results showed that the Australasian genetic signal, previously described as exclusive to Amazonian groups, was also identified in the Pacific coastal population, pointing to a more widespread signal distribution within South America, and possibly implicating an ancient contact between Pacific and Amazonian dwellers."

But no explanation on how did these genes end up in South America. Yes, the current belief is that the predecessors of modern East Asians were related to the Onge, and that these people moved by boat along the sea, bypassing Beringia and reaching America first, where they were later diluted by successive waves from Beringia.

To be Continued in Part 2.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2025 by Austin Whittall © 

Neves and Pucciarelli's paper on affinities between Australians and Paleoindians

As promised, in this post I share a link to a paper by Neves and Pucciarelli (Neves, W.A. and Pucciarelli, H.M. (1991). Morphogical affinities of the first Americans: an exploratory analysis based on early South American human remains. J. Hum. Evol. 21: 261-273).

It tells how they compared the remains of three ancient South American remains (from Tequendama in Colombia, and Lagoa Santa in Brazil) with ancient and contemporary Eurasian and Australian remains. They used thirteen different cranial parameters in their analysis.

This was in the days before DNA was used to compare human groups. Neat and interesting. I thank Marcelo Bruyere for having shared the paper.

I have uploaded it to one of my websites: here.

The authors point out that "The comparison showed that early South Americans clustered very tightly with South Pacific populations, when size and shape were used as taxonomical criteria. When size was removed, the three series occupied an intermediate position".

And conclude that:

"the morphological affinities derived from our study can be perfectly matched to an Asian origin if we assume that Australians and Americans shared a common ancestor until just before they arrived at the New World. Accordingly, both branches, the one that migrated northwards and the one that migrated southwards, did not have a long, independent evolutionary history in northern and southern Asia prior to their settlement in the Americas and Australia. At least not enough to have changed their cranial morphology. If we accept the association detected in this study between Early South Americans, Early Australians and the Zhoukoudian Upper Cave people, Northern China can be suggested as the starting point of both migration branches."

So the remains from the upper Zhoukoudian Cave, which are between 20 and 30,000 years old would belong to a group which is the root of the first wave of Paleoindians and Australians.

It is possible, in my opinion, that this date could even be earlier, considering the date that humans reached Australia (some 50-70 ky ago).

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2025 by Austin Whittall © 

Austronesians and America: the Transpacific Route

A few days ago, I posted about the possibility that an ancient wave of people from what is now known as Melanesia (including Australia), reached America long before the Polynesian contact that has been suggested took place around AD 1200-1400. Today we will look into this scenario.

Polynesians are said to have originated in an "Out of Taiwan" migration that swept in a wide arch south, across the islands of Indonesia, and then across New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, Bougainville, and the Solomon Islands. There they originated the Lapita Culture and established the Polynesian languages around 3,500 years ago. They then moved to the Islands southeast of the Solomons such as Vanuatu and Fiji (3,000 years ago). They stood still there for a long time before spreading into distant Polynesia around 800 AD, and Micronesia around AD 1250 their expansion ended in New Zealand.

The discovery and peopling of Eastern Polynesia required advanced sailing skills. An interesting paper delves in depth with this matter, and states that: "The immense seascape of East Polynesia and increasing contrary winds required advances in navigation and technology. The settlement of East Polynesia involved a package of technological innovations." The inner islands around New Guinea and Melanesia were easy to navigate with wind blowing in two directions, but crossing the ocean towards distant Polynesia meant sailing against the wind.

The invention of the sprit sail, more efficient V-shaped hulls (vs. U-shaped ones), and larger planked double-hulled canoes that could carry more cargo and people, all favored the exansion across Polynesia.

Peopling of Polynesia. Source. See original image

An Earlier Date for Arrivals of Human Beings the Southwestern Pacific

A study published in 2011 reports an "older" age for the first humans in the region:l

"Our results show that the maternal ancestors of most Remote Pacific islanders split from Asian mainland lineages ∼10–20 ka, rather than ∼5.5 ka, as would be the case if they were to be explained by the “out of Taiwan” model. They had established themselves in the Bismarck Archipelago by at least ∼6 ka, rather than arriving there ∼3.5 ka with the advent of Lapita pottery, as the model predicts."

This earlier date is interesting. Did these people have the seafaring abilities of the later ancestral Polynesians? Could their boats cross long ocean distances? It is doubtfull. The Aboriginal population of Australia who has lived on the Island-Continent for +60,000 years, possessed limited seafaring abilities.

See this interesting webpage with images drawn by Europeans during the discovery period (late 1700s) of the watercraft used by Aboriginal people. They used rafts, simple dugout, or bark canoes, tied-reeds, and similar rudimentary vessels, like the one picture below.

They resemble the canoes used by the Fuegian Yamaná and Alakaluf, and the Chono people of southwestern Patagonia. The reed canoes are similar to those used by the Uros of Lake Titicaca in Bolivia. This shows that the ancestral skills of making simple watercraft were shared by all ancient human beings.

They couldn't have crossed the Pacific Ocean in one of these canoes.

The "Kelp Highway"

Another route using calm coastal waters was proposed by Jon Erlandson et al in a 2007 paper (The Kelp Highway Hypothesis: Marine Ecology, the Coastal Migration Theory, and the Peopling of the Americas). In it, they put forward the theory that the kelp seaweed forests along the North Pacific coasts of Asia and North America would have allowed people to find food, on their journey from Australia to Japan, Siberia, Alaska, California. South of this point, mangroves and coral reefs replace the kelp, but, serve the same purpose, guiding the migrants into South America. This kelp highway avoids the risky transpacific oceanic route.

Interestingly, the fuegian people thrived in an area with kelp-rich waters. Kelp algae form underwater forests, which support rich marine life such as fish, sea urchins, crabs, and sea otters. In the North Pacific they were the home of the herbivore Steller's Sea Cow, extinct since the 1700s.

Kelp and seals in the Beagle Channel, Tierra del Fuego. Source

Kelp Forests around the globe. Source

An interesting theory!

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