An Essay Concerning Genetics, Archaeology and Early Human Mobility Commented by Francisco Rothhammer and Luis Alberto Borrero
Article Sidebar
Main Article Content
Abstract
The purpose of this essay is to express my concerns with genetic models focused on the early peopling of the Americas. My attempt here is simply to raise questions and to discuss ways, from the perspective of anthropological archaeology, to enhance the contributions of genetic studies and hopefully to bring closer together genetic and archaeology studies on the early peopling issue. One concern is that the findings of genetic models must be better reconciled with previous ones and with the results of physical anthropology, archaeology, and paleoecology. Others are the comparability of genetic data derived from living groups and from ancient human remains, demographic histories and definitions of demographic units of analysis, sampling designs and representation of data, founder populations, genetic drift and selection, reliability of molecular clocks, and data collection strategies and contamination. There also must be a tacit recognition that geneticists must depend more on the archaeological record, not only for the recovery of human remains, but to a certain degree the co-interpretation of the modern DNA and aDNA data and their context and chronology, as well as the production of broader questions in anthropology. This essay does not pretend to represent the concerns of all archaeologists, but a majority of colleagues that I have interacted with over the past few decades.
Article Details
References
Bodner, M., Perego, U. A., Huber, G., Fendt, L., Rock, A. W., Zimmermann, B.,… Parson, W. (2012). Rapid coastal spread of First Americans: Novel insights from South America’s Southern Cone mitochondrial genomes. Genome Research, 22, 811-820. doi: 10.1101/gr.131722.111
Cann, R. L., Stoneking, M. & Wilson, A. C. (1987). Mitochondrial DNA and human evolution. Nature, 325, 31-36.
Cavalli-Sforza, L. L., Menozzi, P. & Piazza, A. (1994). History and Geography of Human Genes. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Dillehay, T. D. (2009). Probing Deeper into First American Studies. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106, 971-978.
Gibbons, A. (1997). Calibrating the mitochondrial clock. Science, 279, 28-29.
Goebel, T., Waters, W. R. & O’Rourke, D. H. (2008). The late Pleistocene dispersal of modern humans in the Americas. Science, 319, 1497-1502.
Harpending, H. C., Batzer, M., Gurven, M., Jorde, L., Rogers, A. & Sherry, S. (1998). Genetic traces of ancient demography. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 95, 1961-1967.
Hey, J. (1997). Mitochondrial and nuclear genes present conflicting portraits of human origins. Molecular Biological Evolution, 14, 166-172.
Johannsen, N. N., Larson, G., Meltzer, D. J. & Vander Linden, M. (2017). A Composite Window into Human History. Science, 356, 1118-1120.
Llamas, B., Fehren-Schmitz, L., Valverde, G., Soubrier, J., Mallick, S., Rohland, N.,… Haak, W. (2016). Ancient mitochondrial DNA provides high-resolution time scale of the peopling of the Americas. Science Advances, 2(4), e1501385. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.1501385
Llamas, B., Harkins, K. M. & Fehren-Schmitz, L. (2017). Genetic studies of the peopling of the Americas: What insights do diachronic mitochondrial genome datasets provide? Quaternary International, 444, 26-35.
Lewis, C. M. Jr., Lizárraga, B., Tito, R. Y., López, P. W., Iannacome, G. C., Medina, A., M.,... Stone, A. C. (2007). Mitochondrial DNA and the Peopling of South America. Human Biology, 22, 346-366.
Mayr, E. (1963). Animal Species and Evolution. Cambridge, U.K.: Harvard University Press.
Merriwether, D. A., Rothammer, F. & Ferrell, R. E. (1995). Distribution of the Four Founding Lineage Haplotypes in Native Americans Suggests a Single Wave of Migration for the New World. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 98, 411-430.
Moreno-Mayar, J. V., Vinner, L., de Barros Damgaard, P., de la Fuente, C., Chan, J., Spence, J.,... Willerslev, E. (2018). Early Human Dispersals within the Americas. Science, 362 (6419), eaav2621. doi: 10.1126/science.aav2621
Nielsen, R., Akey, J. M., Jakobsson, M., Pritchard, J. K., Tishkoff, S. & Willerslev, E. (2017). Tracing the peopling of the world through genomics. Nature, 541, 302-310.
Novembre, J., Witonsky, D. & Di Rienzo, A. (2016). Assessment of the genetic analyses of Rasmussen et al. 2015. Recuperado de: https://cdm16021.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/api/collection/p16021coll11/
O’Rourke, D. & Suarez, B. (1985). Patterns and correlates of genetic variation in South Amerindians. Annual Human Biology, 13(1), 13-31.
Raghavan, M., Skoglund, P., Graf, K. E., Metspalu, M., Albrechtsen, A., Moltke, I.,… Willerslev, E. (2014). Upper Palaeolithic Siberian genome reveals dual ancestry of Native Americans. Nature, 505(7481), 87-91.
Rasmussen, M., Anzick, S. L., Waters, M. R., Skoglund, P., DeGiorgio, M., Stafford Jr., T. W.,…Willerslev, E. (2014). The genome of a Late Pleistocene human from a Clovis burial site in western Montana. Nature, 506(7487), 225-229.
Relethford, J. H. & Harpending, H.C. (1995). Ancient differences in population size can mimic a recent African origin of modern humans. Current Anthropology, 36, 667-674.
Reich, D. (2019). Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past. New York, USA: Pantheon Books.
Rogers, A. R. & Jorde, L. B. (1995). Genetic evidence on modern human origins. Human Biology, 67, 1-36.
Sedig, J. W. (2019). Ancient DNA’s Impact on Archaeology: What Has Been Learned and How to Build Strong Relationships. The SAA Archaeological Record, 19, 26-32.
Shendure, J., Balasubramanian, S., Church, G. M., Gilbert, W., Rogers, J., Schloss, J. A. & Waterson, R. H. (2017). DNA Sequencing at 40: Past, Present and Future. Nature, 550, 345-353.
Skoglund, P. & Reich, D. (2016). A Genomic View of the Peopling of the Americas. Current Opinion in Genetics & Development, 41, 27-35.
Skoglund, P., Mallick, S., Bortolini, M. C., Chennagiri, N., Hünemeier, T., Petzl-Erler, M. L., Salzano, F. M., Patterson, N. & Reich, D. (2015). Genetic evidence for two founding populations of the America. Nature, 525(7567), 104-108.
Stoneking, M. (1996). Mitochondrial DNA variation and human evolution. En M. Jackson, T. Strachan y G. Dover (Eds.), Human Genome Evolution, pp. 263-281. Oxford, UK: Bios Scientific.
Templeton, A. R. (1996). Gene lineages and human evolution. Science, 272, 1363-1364.
Torroni, A. & Wallace, D. (1995). mtDNA Haplogroups in Native Americans. American Journal of Human Genetics, 56, 1234-1236.
Wang, S., Lewis, C. M. Jr., Jakobsson, M., Ramachandran, S., Ray, N., Bedoya, G.,… Ruiz Linares, A. (2007). Genetic Variation and Population Structure in Native Americans. PLoS Genetics, 3(11), e185. doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.0030185
Weiss, K. (1996). Is there a ‘paradigm’ shift in genetics? Lessons from the study of human diseases. Molecular Phylogenetics Evolution, 5, 259-265.
Weiss, K. M. & Maruyama, T. (1976). Archaeology, population genetics, and studies of human racial ancestry. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 44, 31-50.
Yang, M. A. & Fu, Q. (2018). Insights into Modern Human Prehistory Using Ancient Genomes. Trends in Genetics, 34, 184-196.
Yang, M. A., Gao, X., Theunert, C., Tong, H., Aximu-Petri, A., Nickel, B.,… Fu, Q. (2017). 40,000-YearOld Individual from Asia Provides Insight into Early Population Structure in Eurasia. Current Biology, 27(20), 3202-3208.