If the population did in fact last until relatively recently, I would look at the fuegians that went extinct shortly after European contact as a group that may have had fairly high australomelanesian admixture. They seem kind of like the koi San of the americas.
I think these developments make the disappearance of certain megafauna a bigger mystry than it was. Megafauna survived the presence of tool using hominids in Africa for about a million years, and in Asia for a like time. In North America homo sapiens was on the continent for about 20,000 years before the arrival of the Clovis people and the crash of Megafauna.
Yes, the Clovis point is a nasty weapon, but how much damage can a few thousand paleolithic people do? I think that before we pin the blame on them, we need more evidence and better models.
I think it's more to do with lifestyle than technology. Unlike Africans and tropical Asians, people on the mammoth steppe centered their whole existence around big game hunting. When the ice cleared and they were able to move south, they took that focus with them.
Which shifts the question to: Why were there dedicated megafauna hunters in the tundra, and not the savanna? I'd guess because the humans on the savanna had more of a choice. There are more sources of food in the tropics than in the frozen north, and you have to be desperate or insane to think of hunting a mammoth or elephant with nothing to arm yourself but flint and wood.
Well there were Mammoths. And they disappeared from both North America and Asia. But, so did Mastodons that were forest dwellers. The other extinctions are a bit of a crazy quilt. Sabertooths, lions, and cheetahs disappeared. But, pumas and jaguars are still with us. Dire wolves are gone but grey wolves abound. Short face bears , but not Brown and Black bears. Camels and horses disappeared in NA not in Asia. We know that wild horses were hunted for food on the Eurasian steppe. Were the Clovis people that much better hunters than much later Steppe people who had metallurgy. And why the Clovis people and not some earlier group?
Savanna animals coevolved with humans as they slowly became the worlds most dangerous predators. By the time the modern hunting toolkit developed African animals had defenses such as staying the hell away from human groups.
Those events occurred in the era of rifles and mechanical transportation. I doubt that they tell us very much about what much smaller populations equipped only with a paleolithic toolkit and legs for transportation did. BTW, the California Grizzly was a geographic population not a species. Both Grey Wolves and Brown Bears are still with us.
BTW, I'm not talking about animal knowledge, just behavior. Think through the evolutionary logic. There is a pretty obvious fitness advantage to not getting killed by the most efficient killers out there, but evolution can only run so fast.
Coming to this a few days late, but I can't help but wonder if first wave was in some sense not particularly fit. We know that the main body of Amerinds came from a very small effective population, but perhaps this wave was even smaller - like descended from a literal handful of people. After the first generation, this would result in an extreme level of inbreeding, which could have had long-term consequences for fertility, general hardiness, and intelligence. Plus if it was the paleolithic version of a group of castaways, they might not have arrived with the full cultural toolkit of their source population - or had some skills which quickly were lost due to the (presumably) initial easy life of coastal gleaning.
This could also help explain why this first wave seems to have been largely wiped clean, save for some portions of the Amazon. When a less inbred population with the full cultural toolkit came through the ice-free passage, they were superior both biologically and culturally, and quickly lapped them.
Astounding stuff. Thanks for the nice summary. From today's vantage point it seems like archaeologists placed way too much emphasis on trying to fit things to old evidence rather than realize their evidence was vastly incomplete. But the record remains incomplete and I'm wondering if what we're discovering now can help aid in the discovery of further sites and more evidence. I've always wondered at how archaeological sites are discovered . . . .
Very definitely. It'll be interesting how much underwater sites can yield in the future. The mapping of Doggerland & the knowledge we gained of it had much to do with the search for North Sea Oil. Many of the topographical surveys that archeologists in England & Denmark & The Netherlands used to investigate were made by Oil Companies searching for drilling sites.
Old archaeologists placed emphasis on "old" evidence because that's what they had. Genetics in archaeology & anthropology is very, very new.
Also, from everything I've read (as an anthropology student in the early 1980s) American Archaeology was very controlled by the Smithsonian & major University Departments. They kept out people who didn't follow orthodoxy. You can find sites to investigate but funding is everything.
European Universities were much more tolerant of maverick theories in the Americas but did the same in Europe to European & Classical mavericks. Some archaeologists ironically acknowledge that newer methods & theories advance with the death of old Department heads.
The article states: "In other words, the first modern humans who were present in the New World did not contribute much ancestry to today’s Native Americans at all." So, 2 questions:
1. In David Reich's book on ancient DNA, he talks about something called "Population Y". Perhaps I missed this in the article, but would do the quotation above refer to Population Y?
2. Now, If the the first modern humans in the New World were of a different ancestry as Native Americans.....Wouldn't this be problematic for the idea of "First Nations" as now understood, if indeed, the notion of "indigineity"?
And doesn't this open up the remote possibility that these 2 populations may have met and not liked each other, but one may have been more agile and triumphant than the other?
Because it seems to me that all this opens up very delicate territory.
I have some questions for you (or anyone else here) with respect to your comments on Haplogroup D, wondering if there's a way to tie the recent paper on the peopling of the Philippines into this.
So my understanding of the Y-haplogroup situation with the various living Australo-Papuan-related groups is:
Actual Australo-Papuan populations: haplogroups C1b, K2b (particularly M and S).
Aeta: C1b, K2b (particularly P and P2).
Andamanese/Onge: D + some (one 18th century sample) P-M1254*
The Yana paper modelled ANE (ie Yana and MA-1) as 78% West Eurasian-related and 22% Onge-related.
Is it plausible then that Haplogroup P's descendants Q and R found their way into ANE via this Onge-related component, perhaps via a coastal route that eventually went up the Amur and infiltrated into the Baikal region?
And would it be reasonable to think that Beringians were always a three-way mix of ANE, Onge-like coastal migrants, and inland Tianyuan-related East Asians (basically the three clades you mention in your Deep Origins of East Eurasians post)? And that early and coastal populations skewed to the Onge side, and later and interior populations skewed to the Tianyuan and Yana/MA-1 side, with the Tianyuan side becoming increasingly dominant in the Holocene?
Where this differs I think from your post is that rather than expecting 20kya remains (if we find and if we sequence them) in the Americas to be drastically different both on the autosome and Y-chromosome from more recent populations, instead we would find a more gradual change as new waves arrive first down the coast and eventually inland in the Americas. Which would mean the population structure in South America could be larger and older than anticipated currently.
One thing I noticed a while back too is that the South/Central American populations with the highest affinity with the Onge also have the lowest affinity with Denisovans. So perhaps the Denisovan ancestry in the Americas came from Tianyuan, and the coastal route had relatively few Denisovans when the Onge-like coastal route was taken.
I find that last point rather strange though given the apparent persistence of Denisovans in the Philippines. Toba?
Re-reading the Tianyuan paper by the way, I noticed that the groups with extra Onge-like admixture also have extra Tianyuan-like affinity (in roughly equal proportions). So that blows my Tianyuan->Denisovan theory out of the water, but it also tells us something more about what that first wave may have been like.
Thank you Razib. Very interesting. Wonder what happened to the Paleo-Americans in North and Central America. Could they have died out in N America during the LGM and gotten replaced by Beringians?
The low density or small population size makes it more likely they were genetically swamped by a larger wave. But it makes me wonder if the Beringians had diseases the earlier wave didn't. Could new diseases played important roles twice in the Americas?
Fascinating. When I saw the Sept 24 front-page story in The Wall Street Journal, my first reaction was, "I hope Razib writes about this." Thank you!
Really like stuff like this. Pithy and clear but still thorough.
If the population did in fact last until relatively recently, I would look at the fuegians that went extinct shortly after European contact as a group that may have had fairly high australomelanesian admixture. They seem kind of like the koi San of the americas.
good point. i hope we have ancient DNA for this
I think these developments make the disappearance of certain megafauna a bigger mystry than it was. Megafauna survived the presence of tool using hominids in Africa for about a million years, and in Asia for a like time. In North America homo sapiens was on the continent for about 20,000 years before the arrival of the Clovis people and the crash of Megafauna.
Yes, the Clovis point is a nasty weapon, but how much damage can a few thousand paleolithic people do? I think that before we pin the blame on them, we need more evidence and better models.
I think it's more to do with lifestyle than technology. Unlike Africans and tropical Asians, people on the mammoth steppe centered their whole existence around big game hunting. When the ice cleared and they were able to move south, they took that focus with them.
Which shifts the question to: Why were there dedicated megafauna hunters in the tundra, and not the savanna? I'd guess because the humans on the savanna had more of a choice. There are more sources of food in the tropics than in the frozen north, and you have to be desperate or insane to think of hunting a mammoth or elephant with nothing to arm yourself but flint and wood.
Well there were Mammoths. And they disappeared from both North America and Asia. But, so did Mastodons that were forest dwellers. The other extinctions are a bit of a crazy quilt. Sabertooths, lions, and cheetahs disappeared. But, pumas and jaguars are still with us. Dire wolves are gone but grey wolves abound. Short face bears , but not Brown and Black bears. Camels and horses disappeared in NA not in Asia. We know that wild horses were hunted for food on the Eurasian steppe. Were the Clovis people that much better hunters than much later Steppe people who had metallurgy. And why the Clovis people and not some earlier group?
Savanna animals coevolved with humans as they slowly became the worlds most dangerous predators. By the time the modern hunting toolkit developed African animals had defenses such as staying the hell away from human groups.
Maybe. Elephants might be smart enough and social enough to maintain that kind of knowledge. But, is there any evidence for this thesis.
We've sort of seen it happen in historical time with grey wolves and California Grizzlies for example.
Those events occurred in the era of rifles and mechanical transportation. I doubt that they tell us very much about what much smaller populations equipped only with a paleolithic toolkit and legs for transportation did. BTW, the California Grizzly was a geographic population not a species. Both Grey Wolves and Brown Bears are still with us.
BTW, I'm not talking about animal knowledge, just behavior. Think through the evolutionary logic. There is a pretty obvious fitness advantage to not getting killed by the most efficient killers out there, but evolution can only run so fast.
Coming to this a few days late, but I can't help but wonder if first wave was in some sense not particularly fit. We know that the main body of Amerinds came from a very small effective population, but perhaps this wave was even smaller - like descended from a literal handful of people. After the first generation, this would result in an extreme level of inbreeding, which could have had long-term consequences for fertility, general hardiness, and intelligence. Plus if it was the paleolithic version of a group of castaways, they might not have arrived with the full cultural toolkit of their source population - or had some skills which quickly were lost due to the (presumably) initial easy life of coastal gleaning.
This could also help explain why this first wave seems to have been largely wiped clean, save for some portions of the Amazon. When a less inbred population with the full cultural toolkit came through the ice-free passage, they were superior both biologically and culturally, and quickly lapped them.
Astounding stuff. Thanks for the nice summary. From today's vantage point it seems like archaeologists placed way too much emphasis on trying to fit things to old evidence rather than realize their evidence was vastly incomplete. But the record remains incomplete and I'm wondering if what we're discovering now can help aid in the discovery of further sites and more evidence. I've always wondered at how archaeological sites are discovered . . . .
Rising sea level has covered the early coastal sites that could provide more evidence of pre-Clovis ocean-going migrants.
Very definitely. It'll be interesting how much underwater sites can yield in the future. The mapping of Doggerland & the knowledge we gained of it had much to do with the search for North Sea Oil. Many of the topographical surveys that archeologists in England & Denmark & The Netherlands used to investigate were made by Oil Companies searching for drilling sites.
Old archaeologists placed emphasis on "old" evidence because that's what they had. Genetics in archaeology & anthropology is very, very new.
Also, from everything I've read (as an anthropology student in the early 1980s) American Archaeology was very controlled by the Smithsonian & major University Departments. They kept out people who didn't follow orthodoxy. You can find sites to investigate but funding is everything.
European Universities were much more tolerant of maverick theories in the Americas but did the same in Europe to European & Classical mavericks. Some archaeologists ironically acknowledge that newer methods & theories advance with the death of old Department heads.
The article states: "In other words, the first modern humans who were present in the New World did not contribute much ancestry to today’s Native Americans at all." So, 2 questions:
1. In David Reich's book on ancient DNA, he talks about something called "Population Y". Perhaps I missed this in the article, but would do the quotation above refer to Population Y?
2. Now, If the the first modern humans in the New World were of a different ancestry as Native Americans.....Wouldn't this be problematic for the idea of "First Nations" as now understood, if indeed, the notion of "indigineity"?
And doesn't this open up the remote possibility that these 2 populations may have met and not liked each other, but one may have been more agile and triumphant than the other?
Because it seems to me that all this opens up very delicate territory.
Great post Razib. You've gained a subscriber.
I have some questions for you (or anyone else here) with respect to your comments on Haplogroup D, wondering if there's a way to tie the recent paper on the peopling of the Philippines into this.
So my understanding of the Y-haplogroup situation with the various living Australo-Papuan-related groups is:
Actual Australo-Papuan populations: haplogroups C1b, K2b (particularly M and S).
Aeta: C1b, K2b (particularly P and P2).
Andamanese/Onge: D + some (one 18th century sample) P-M1254*
The Yana paper modelled ANE (ie Yana and MA-1) as 78% West Eurasian-related and 22% Onge-related.
Is it plausible then that Haplogroup P's descendants Q and R found their way into ANE via this Onge-related component, perhaps via a coastal route that eventually went up the Amur and infiltrated into the Baikal region?
And would it be reasonable to think that Beringians were always a three-way mix of ANE, Onge-like coastal migrants, and inland Tianyuan-related East Asians (basically the three clades you mention in your Deep Origins of East Eurasians post)? And that early and coastal populations skewed to the Onge side, and later and interior populations skewed to the Tianyuan and Yana/MA-1 side, with the Tianyuan side becoming increasingly dominant in the Holocene?
Where this differs I think from your post is that rather than expecting 20kya remains (if we find and if we sequence them) in the Americas to be drastically different both on the autosome and Y-chromosome from more recent populations, instead we would find a more gradual change as new waves arrive first down the coast and eventually inland in the Americas. Which would mean the population structure in South America could be larger and older than anticipated currently.
One thing I noticed a while back too is that the South/Central American populations with the highest affinity with the Onge also have the lowest affinity with Denisovans. So perhaps the Denisovan ancestry in the Americas came from Tianyuan, and the coastal route had relatively few Denisovans when the Onge-like coastal route was taken.
I find that last point rather strange though given the apparent persistence of Denisovans in the Philippines. Toba?
Q and R are from SE asia according to michael hammer
Re-reading the Tianyuan paper by the way, I noticed that the groups with extra Onge-like admixture also have extra Tianyuan-like affinity (in roughly equal proportions). So that blows my Tianyuan->Denisovan theory out of the water, but it also tells us something more about what that first wave may have been like.
Thank you Razib. Very interesting. Wonder what happened to the Paleo-Americans in North and Central America. Could they have died out in N America during the LGM and gotten replaced by Beringians?
The low density or small population size makes it more likely they were genetically swamped by a larger wave. But it makes me wonder if the Beringians had diseases the earlier wave didn't. Could new diseases played important roles twice in the Americas?
Thanks so much!
Have Native American objections to archeology on their presumed ancestors held back American paleogenetics relative to European work?
Wow. Really opens for new thinking.