Palaeo-Eskimo genetic ancestry and the peopling of Chukotka and North America

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Issue Date
2019-06-05Author
Flegontov, Pavel
Altınışık, N. Ezgi
Changmai, Piya
Rohland, Nadin
Mallick, Swapan
Adamski, Nicole
Bolnick, Deborah A.
Broomandkhoshbacht, Nasreen
Candilio, Francesca
Culleton, Brendan J.
Flegontova, Olga
Friesen, T. Max
Jeong, Choongwon
Harper, Thomas K.
Keating, Denise
Kennett, Douglas J.
Kim, Alexander M.
Lamnidis, Thiseas C.
Lawson, Ann Marie
Olalde, Iñigo
Oppenheimer, Jonas
Potter, Ben A.
Raff, Jennifer
Sattler, Robert A.
Skoglund, Pontus
Stewardson, Kristin
Vajda, Edward J.
Vasilyev, Sergey
Veselovskaya, Elizaveta
Hayes, M. Geoffrey
O’Rourke, Dennis H.
Krause, Johannes
Pinhasi, Ron
Reich, David
Schiffels, Stephan
Publisher
Nature Research
Type
Article
Article Version
Scholarly/refereed, author accepted manuscript
Rights
© 2019, Springer Nature
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Show full item recordAbstract
Much of the American Arctic was first settled 5,000 years ago, by groups of people known as Palaeo-Eskimos. They were subsequently joined and largely displaced around 1,000 years ago by ancestors of the present-day Inuit and Yup’ik1,2,3. The genetic relationship between Palaeo-Eskimos and Native American, Inuit, Yup’ik and Aleut populations remains uncertain4,5,6. Here we present genomic data for 48 ancient individuals from Chukotka, East Siberia, the Aleutian Islands, Alaska, and the Canadian Arctic. We co-analyse these data with data from present-day Alaskan Iñupiat and West Siberian populations and published genomes. Using methods based on rare-allele and haplotype sharing, as well as established techniques4,7,8,9, we show that Palaeo-Eskimo-related ancestry is ubiquitous among people who speak Na-Dene and Eskimo–Aleut languages. We develop a comprehensive model for the Holocene peopling events of Chukotka and North America, and show that Na-Dene-speaking peoples, people of the Aleutian Islands, and Yup’ik and Inuit across the Arctic region all share ancestry from a single Palaeo-Eskimo-related Siberian source.
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Citation
Flegontov, P., Altınışık, N. E., Changmai, P., Rohland, N., Mallick, S., Adamski, N., … Schiffels, S. (2019). Palaeo-Eskimo genetic ancestry and the peopling of Chukotka and North America. Nature, 570(7760), 236–240. doi:10.1038/s41586-019-1251-y
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