Inaugural Post
This post is to mostly document my thoughts on the settlement of the americas based on the genetics data. Introduction Colonization and settlement of the Americas is an ongoing area of archaeological and archeo-genomics research that with each new sequence a complex genetic history with relationships to multiple different world-wide populations is being revealed. Patterson et al. (2012) noted a strong genetic relationship between Western European and Native American populations and they postulated the existence of an ancient common ancestor to both populations which was termed Ancient Northern Eurasians (ANE). Raghavan et al. (2014b) analyzed the genetics of 24,000 year old (cal. 14C years BP) remains of a boy excavated in Ma’lta Siberia, demonstrated that the Ma’lta boy ( MA-1) contained genetic elements in common to both Native Americans and to some contemporary European populations. They then postulated that MA-1 was representative of the putative ANE population (Raghavan et