Research Reveals New Link In Australasian and South American Ancestry

[left-of-center2012]

A new DNA study has confirmed that indigenous people living in multiple locations in South America are distantly related to the people of Australasia, an umbrella term that includes indigenous Australians and Melanesians (inhabitants of the islands of Oceania, which are located south of Southeast Asia).

This new genetic survey, which was led by geneticist Tábita Hünemeier and evolutionary biologist Marcos Araújo Castro e Silva from the University of São Paulo in Brazil, analyzed genetic data obtained from 383 indigenous people living in various areas of South America. After completing a comparative analysis, they discovered distinctive genetic traces that were shared by indigenous people in Australasia and three indigenous South American groups: the Chotuna (from the Pacific coast region of Peru), the Guaraní Kaiowá (from west central Brazil), and the Xavánte (from central Brazil).

"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," the researchers wrote in an article appearing in the most recent edition of PNAS.

https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-evolution-human-origins/south-american-ancestry-0015141

[Botany]

1. They came over on boats to South America not the land bridge to present day Alaska

n/t

[wnylib]

5. Looks like there were multiple routes

and more than one wave of people from more than one location.

[Botany]

6. About 25 years ago I heard a Shawnee person speaking of his tribe's oral history and he said that ..

... his people took boats across the pacific and landed in South America and then worked their
way north.

[wnylib]

7. That's interesting, but I'm a bit skeptical. Before being

displaced by Euro-Americans, the Shawnee were primarily in the eastern part of the Midwest, especially Ohio. Their ancestors would have had to sail the Pacific, cross the Isthmus of Panama, and travel overland several thousand miles through changing habitats to reach what today is Ohio. Each habitat change would require different sets of survival skills to learn, which would have altered their culture. That's a lot of changes to make and still maintain a memory of a Pacific crossing. Besides, crossing the Pacific was a very difficult undertaking requiring the boat-building and navigational skills of a maritime oriented people. The only people known to have been capable of it from ancient into more recent times are the Polynesians and that was after North America was already occupied.

From archaeological evidence, linguistic family studies, and DNA haplogroups, it looks like some people traveled by boat on a northern route at least 20,000 years ago and possibly earlier. That would have taken them from northeastern Asia along the southern shore of the Bering land bridge, to the Pacific coast of North America.

Some continued going south down the Pacific coast of North America. Since they could travel by boat some adventurous groups might have reached North America before Beringia completely connected Asia and North America.

While some continued south down the coast, others apparently followed rivers inland, south of the glaciers and spread out from there. The dates of Meadowcroft Rockshelter in PA indicate human presence 14,000 years ago, before the glaciers melted. Deeper levels at Meadowcroft suggest even earlier dates.

Another path was on land, across Beringia into Alaska, where they remained until glacial decline made inland northern North America (Canada and the US northwest) more accessible to them. (That's the old Clovis theory.)

Fairly recent DNA studies show that Polynesians did reach Peru, but that was after Peru was already settled by people from Asia. The Polynesians carried on trade and intermarriage with the people of Peru, but were not the first to reach Peru.

The latest arrivals to North America (5000 to 7000 years ago, if I remember right) were the ancestors of the Innuit people who live in the Arctic regions today.

Different routes by different groups at different times. But all of them originated in Eastern Asia.

[Botany]

8. Professor Reich had in this book that humans reached the Americas via the land bridge and boats ....

... to what is now Alaska but the glacial ice age ice caused them to be stuck so most of them migrated south along the
coast but some of the ice melted in central Alaska allowing a north to south passage that allowed migration too.

It would be interesting to look @ the age of the DNA on the genomes that scientists found on native people in S. America.




Great Book but it took me a long time to read and understand just parts of it.

BTW the Shawnee speaker told us that their people had at on time been in what is now Florida
and the Swanee River got its name from the Shawnee.

[wnylib]

9. The origin of the name for the Suwannee River

has a few hypotheses, none definitively established. I looked it up because Florida is so distant from the base range of the Shawnee. The Shawnee origin was suggested by an Indian agent as a guess, but the Shawnee had only one village in Florida, not on the Suwannee River. The Native people of the area were the Timucua and their name for the river was Guacara. One suggestion made in the late 1800s is that the name comes from the Creek tribe's word, Siwani, meaning "echo." But there is no evidence for that in the Creek language. The most accepted origin of the name is the Spanish mission of San Juan on the river.

The Shawnee belong to the huge Algonquian linguistic group of Native Americans whose lands before being displaced were primarily in Canada, New England, the upper Midwest (Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin), Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia, and parts of Pennsylvania. A few extended southeast around Georgia and the Carolinas. They include some well known tribal names - Massachusett, Wampanoag, Powhattan, Ottawa, Lenape (Delaware), Pequot, Mahican, Mohegan, Cheyenne, Blackfoot, Illini, Powhattan, Miami (in western Ohio), Shawnee, and many more.

The Shawnee migrated a lot, but are believed by some anthropologists to be descendents of the prehistoric Fort Ancient culture of the Ohio Valley - southern Ohio, northern Kentucky, and West Virginia. In historic times, they were in Ohio and frequently waged war raids on the Cherokee over hunting land in Kentucky. Chief Tecumseh was their leader in Ohio.

I am not familiar with Professor David Reich's works so I looked him up. According to the Harvard Gazette, he and a group of scholars, including British researchers, determined that there were back migrations to Siberia from Alaska. I read about that several years ago, when Native haplotypes were being discovered. His work has established that early arrivals to North America took a coastal route to South America, a hypothesis long held by archaeologists like James Adovasio, among others. So now we have DNA evidence of it. I disagree with his timing of 15,000 years ago, though, because Meadowcroft shows people in PA 14,000+ years ago, possibly to 20,000. Other sites in North America, south of the glaciers, also suggest older timelines.

But, as the Harvard Gazette reports, Reich says that the DNA for Native people of North America is too scarce for accurate migration tracing and dating until there is more available.

For a good overview of the early Americans, before they settled into linguistic families and tribal identities, I recommend James Adovasio's book, The First Americans.

[Botany]

11. Stuff

It has been years but the Shawnee speaker said that the name Suwanee (thanx for the proper spelling)
came from the tribe's name Shawnee and they were in contact with the river as they migrated up from the
south after his people had landed in South America after crossing the Pacific on boats. I have no way of
knowing what if any parts of his people's story is true.

Ft. Ancient in OH shows how much we have come to understand some of the history of the native peoples.
It was not a fort but a trading post where foot paths came together on the banks of the Miami River in S.W.
OH. Goods from the Gulf of Mexico and the south, the east coast (what is now N.C.), and Canada have been
found there.

Reich in his book said it is very hard to get genetic material from many current day native Americans or to
get permission to look for genomic material in the skeletons of older native peoples because of how "they"
have been treated in the past.

all the best!

[wnylib]

12. Regarding what the Shawnee person told you,

there is simply no evidence. Since the Shawnee are part of the larger Algonquian linguistic/cultural group, there should be corroborating stories about arrival from the Pacific among other Algonquian tribes.

Regading Fort Ancient, in anthropological use, it is simply the name given to a pre Columbian culture who lived where Fort Ancient was later established.

Native Americans did have a very extensive trading system. They used rivers like highways. The Mississippi took Native traders as far south as the Gulf of Mexico. Tributaries of the Mississippi took them far in both the east and west for trade. In the area where I grew up in northwestern PA, it was possible for preColumbian people to get trade goods from as far away as the ancient Adena and Hopewell cultures of southern Ohio via the Ohio River to the three rivers conjunction where Pittsburgh is today, to the Alegheny River, and finally to French Creek, a large creek that extends out from the Allegheny. The Allegheny (just one of several different spellings) goes on into Seneca tribal territory in western NY.

So objects that originated in one place can turn up anywhere along a trade route without the tribe who received it ever having lived in the area of origin for the objects. The Maya had traders who sailed the coast of the Gulf of Mexico up to where New Orleans is today. From there, the people of the Mississippian Culture could (and did) in turn, trade some of those Mayan objects farther north for items from northern people. People on the Gulf coast also absorbed some cultural customs from traders to the south of them, which gradually spread northward along the Mississippi trade routes.

There are archaeological trails of trade that can be dated, showing that items were traded from a different group than the ones who received them.

[Botany]

13. Are you in Meadville?

The Shawnee speaker was interesting though and he spoke of trading with people in what is now southern United States... he spoke that they didn't run around in buckskin clothes but they liked cotton too.

[wnylib]

14. No, I am in western NY state now, but

I am originally from Erie. You must know the area if you are familiar with Meadville. My great grandmother came from a very small town near Meadville called Springboro. Both are in Crawford County, just south of Erie County. French Creek extends into Erie County.

I'm not surprised that the Shawnee man said that the people wore cloth instead of buckskin. Cloth would be one of the trade items from farther south, and also from the east.

I lived in Ohio for 5 years, first in Toledo and then Cleveland. One summer, we drove around the southern part of the state and visited the Hopewell mounds and Fort Ancient area. At that time, the belief was that Serpent Mound was built by the Hopewell. Now it is believed that the Fort Ancient people built it.

I refreshed myself on the anth/arch of the region because it's been a long time since I was there and a while since I studied the preColumbian anthro of the region. So I want to clarify something from my last post regarding the people and naming of Fort Ancient.

The Hopewell preceded the Fort Ancient culture by a few centuries. For a time, the belief was that the Fort Ancient people were descendants of the Hopewell who remained in the area after the Hopewell culture declined. That might still be true to some degree, but there is evidence that two Siouan tribes from farther east (yes, east) moved into the eastern part of the Fort Ancient culture area in Fort Ancient's later stages, but left again as other people moved in. We associate the Sioux with Plains people farther west, but there were pockets of Siouan people in the east, too.

The Shawnee share an origin legend with the Kickapoo that they were once one tribe, but split over a dispute. Their languages are nearly identical, so the legend appears to be true. Both the Shawnee and Kickapoo claim ancestry from the Algonquian Lenape, aka Lenni Lenape, aka the Delaware. (Delaware name came from European colonists, not what they called themselves.) Both tribes refer to the Lenape as their "grandfathers," which several other Algonquian tribes do also.

The Lenape territory was NJ, southeastern PA, MD, and southeastern NY, around present day NYC and the Hudson Valley. They were caught up in conflicts with the Susquehanock and the eastern Iroquois league in the beaver wars and pressured by colonists moving into their territory. Branches of the Lenape moved westward into Ohio and Kentucky. They had a name in their language for the Lenape bands who lived in the southern NJ and MD area that means "southern people." I Don't remember what that Lenape word for their "southern" bands was, but it was similar to the word Shawnee. It might be that the Shawnee man you spoke to knew the term or its meaning and mistook it to mean what we call the South today.

The Shawnee and Kickapoo languages are not only nearly identical to each other, but both derive from the Lenape language. When the Shawnee left their eastern seaboard land, they became migrants without their own territory. That happened to numerous displaced tribes in US history. Most displaced tribes sought new lands for themselves, resulting in wars, or negotiated permission to move into other tribal territories. Small bands of Shawnee dispersed into a few different areas, but the majority moved into and claimed the declined Fort Ancient region for themselves. A culturally related people, the Monongehela, went to southwestern PA and to W.VA.

Around the same time, the Iroquoian Seneca were expanding their control into western PA and parts of Ohio. Some Seneca and Cuyuga (also Iroquoian) settled in Ohio. The Iroquois Confederacy had defeated the Susquehannock and Lenape. Several people from those tribes went to Ohio, too. They became known as the Minga or Minque Seneca, under Seneca control nominally, but apart from direct control as discontented "independents."

It's that later period under loose Seneca control that Ohio became a really tribally mixed Indian Territory, until white settlers demanded their removal and they scattered. Most ended up in Oklahoma, after brief stays in other regions, like Kansas, Missouri, and Wisconsin.

[multigraincracker]

2. Like a spreading virus,

humans come in waves.

[Judi Lynn]

3. Looking forward so much to new articles on this. It's the first I've heard. Thank you! ⭐️

[wnylib]

4. What about the recent evidence of

contact between Polynesia and the western coast of South America? It extended to some peoole farther inland than the coast.

Depending on how distant tbe DNA connections are, the Melanesian DNA might have reached South America via Polynesia.

[Judi Lynn]

10. It was really thought-provoking reading the markers extend to the interior of Brazil in the article.

That's quite a distance, isn't it?

Really hoping they will be uncovering more information in this area soon. Definitely looking forward to it.

Breakthroughs in areas like this will completely transform our current views, won't they? It's so important to keep the search going.

Thanks.