Maanasa Raghavan and colleagues published the complete sequence of the oldest (thus far) modern human genome in Nature today (“Upper Palaeolithic Siberian genome reveals dual ancestry of Native Americans”).
This genome is important not only because it’s so old (dating to about 24,000 years before present), but also because it’s from the Lake Baikal region in Siberia, which is where the population ancestral to Native Americans has long been thought to have come from. Analysis of the genome shows that it is indeed closely related to Native American populations, which supports the hypothesis of their Siberian ancestry.
Interestingly, the ancient Siberian genome also shows close affinity with modern Western Eurasian populations. What does this mean? The New York Times report on this article suggests a number of scenarios, but I am a bit more cautious about inferring too much about population history from one genome as I explain in this LiveScience article.
The results from this cool study show that the genetic landscape of Siberia has changed quite a bit over the last 24,000 years. It’s yet another reminder that our conceptions of what is “European” or “Asian” genetically is based on modern patterns of diversity. Taken to its extremes, this can be a bit essentialist, as population movement and random genetic changes over time have certainly brought about changes to the geographic distributions of lineages.
I can’t emphasize enough how technically difficult it is to sequence even the tiniest portions of ancient DNA, let alone complete genomes, let alone complete genomes this old. This paper is a fantastic achievement, and I hope that we will see more ancient genomes from this region in the near future.
UPDATE: I’m also quoted in a Nature article discussing this paper–check it out!
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“This genome is important not only because it’s so old (dating to about 24,000 years before present), but also because it’s from the Lake Baikal region in Siberia, which is where the population ancestral to Native Americans has long been thought to have come from. Analysis of the genome shows that it is indeed closely related to Native American populations, which supports the hypothesis of their Siberian ancestry.”
The Mal’ta boy’s people is not directly related to Native Americans. His y-haplotype was R and mtDNA U. Both are not Native American. Why does he show relationship to them? Because haplogroup R and haplogroup Q were once one haplogroup (aka one people) before branching out. Sometime around 30,000-35,000 years ago haplgroup Q and R split from each other. R is the western brother of Q. The R tribe migrated west and was isolated during the ice age from haplogroup Q. Haplogroup R established itself in western Siberia where it began to outcompete the local tribes (likely belonging to haplogroup C ~ European/Eurasian branch) and taking their women (haplogroup U). Eventually haplogroup R expands all the way in to Eastern Europe where it has branched into R1b(southern R) and R1a(northern forest R). As haplogroup R expands west and keep taking women from the former inhabitants of the land, they become more western in DNA. Mal’ta boy represents the beginning of this process. During the metal ages haplogroup R1b and R1a form the Indo-European culture and they expand further west and slaughter the natives of Europe. In symmetry to them, their old cousins haplogroup Q enter America and slaughter the Solutrean (plus other older humans) in the other side of the Atlantic.
That is why Mal’ta boy shares some DNA with native Americans with whom his tribe had as some distant past branched off with and yet at the same time has European DNA to whom his tribe is ancestor of.
History of R1b
http://www.eupedia.com/europe/Haplogroup_R1b_Y-DNA.shtml
Hisotry of R1a
http://www.eupedia.com/europe/Haplogroup_R1a_Y-DNA.shtml