First Greenlander was Siberian: It all belongs to Mother Russia!

[Syt]

ABC: Ancient Greenland Gene Map Has a Surprise

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Scientists have sequenced the DNA from four frozen hairs of a Greenlander who died 4,000 years ago in a study they say takes genetic technology into several new realms.

Surprisingly, the long-dead man appears to have originated in Siberia and is unrelated to modern Greenlanders, Morten Rasmussen of the University of Copenhagen and colleagues found.

"This provides evidence for a migration from Siberia into the New World some 5,500 years ago, independent of that giving rise to the modern Native Americans and Inuit," the researchers wrote in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.

Not only can the findings help transform the study of archeology, but they can help answer questions about the origins of modern populations and disease, they said.

"Such studies have the potential to reconstruct not only our genetic and geographical origins, but also what our ancestors looked like," David Lambert and Leon Huynen of Griffith University in Queensland, Australia, wrote in a commentary.
The DNA gives strong hints about the man, nicknamed Inuk. "Brown eyes, brown skin, he had shovel-form front teeth," Eske Willerslev, who oversaw the study, told a telephone briefing. Such teeth are characteristic of East Asian and Native American populations.

He had the genes for early hair loss, too. "Because we found quite a lot of hair from this guy, we presume he actually died quite young," Willerslev said.

The man lived among the Saqqaq people, the earliest known culture in southern Greenland that lasted from around 2500 BC until about 800 BC.

Scientists have disagreed on who these people were -- whether they descended from the peoples who crossed the Bering Strait 30,000 to 40,000 years ago to settle the New World or whether they were more recent immigrants.

Willerslev's team pulled DNA from hairs found in a frozen Saqqaq site and sequenced it just as they would a modern person's full genome, looking for characteristic mutations.

[garbon]

re-post

[jimmy olsen]

A much better link.

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2010/02/10/2198747.aspx

Some highlights.

The results confirmed Inuk's Siberian background in surprisingly detailed ways:

    * His blood type was A+, which is found in very high frequency in east Asian populations.
    * Combinations of SNPs suggest that he had brown eyes as well as dark, thick hair and a skin color that was not as light as that commonly found in Europeans.
    * One of the SNPs is linked to shovel-graded front teeth, a characteristic trait of Asian and Native American populations.
    * Another SNP is linked to having earwax of the dry type that is typical of Asians and Native Americans, rather than the "wet" earwax found in other ethnic groups.
    * A 12-SNP combination, linked to metabolism and body mass index, suggests that Inuk was adapted to a cold climate.
    * Inuk's genetic code also indicates that he had an increased risk of baldness. The fact that Inuk's hair could be recovered thousands of years later led Willerslev to suggest half-jokingly that "he actually died quite young."

[Queequeg]

Aren't Native Americans descended from Siberian populations anyway? 

[jimmy olsen]

Aren't Native Americans descended from Siberian populations anyway? 

The Clovis people were likely descended from a population of Siberians, though they were likely a different set of Siberians than these were. After all 6,000 plus years separated the migrations.

There was probably an earlier migration that was more closely related to modern Polynesians IIRC.

[Neil]

Is there actually any of the original Siberian stock remaining?  Have they all been exterminated by the succession of evil peoples that passed through Siberia?

[Queequeg]

Is there actually any of the original Siberian stock remaining?  Have they all been exterminated by the succession of evil peoples that passed through Siberia?

Russians were generally way less extermination-happy going through Siberia than Americans were going west, and most of the massacres that did happen in the Muslim parts of the Russian East.