[Aztlan] Russian and Native American DNA

[michael ruggeri]

Native American populations share gene signature

00:01 14 February 2007
NewScientist.com news service
Roxanne Khamsi

The proportion of people with the 9RA gene marker is high throughout the
Americas

A distinctive, repeating sequence of DNA found in people living at the
eastern edge of Russia is also widespread among Native Americans,
according to a new study.
The finding lends support to the idea that Native Americans descended
from a common founding population that lived near the Bering land bridge
for some time.
Kari Schroeder at the University of California in Davis, US, and
colleagues sampled the genes from various populations around the globe,
including two at the eastern edge of Siberia, 53 elsewhere in Asia and
18 Native American populations. The study examined samples from roughly
1500 people in total, including 445 Native Americans.
The team looked for a series of nine repeating chunks of DNA, known as
9RA, which falls in a non-coding region of chromosome 9.
They found the 9RA sequence in at least one member of all the Native
American populations tested, such as the Cherokee and Apache people. The
two populations in eastern Siberia, where the Bering land bridge once
connected Asia to North America, also tested positive for the 9RA
sequence.
The 9RA sequence did not appear in any of the other Asian populations
examined in the study, including those from other parts of Siberia, from
Mongolia or Japan.
Multiple migrations?
According to Schroeder, the high prevalence of this gene marker among
native populations of North and South America - and its absence in most
of Asia - lends strong support to the idea that Native Americans can
trace their ancestry to a common founding population.
The 9RA mutation probably occurred in an ancestral population located at
the eastern edge of Siberia, which subsequently migrated over the Bering
land bridge, Schroeder says (watch how the land bridge was gradually
submerged as see levels rose). There may have been multiple migrations
from this founding population, occurring thousands of years apart, she
adds.
"How many times did people cross the Bering land bridge? That would be a
very difficult question to answer," says Jeffrey Long at the University
of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor, Michigan, US, who contributed
to the new study.
Other experts have previously suggested that Native Americans do not
share a common ancestry because of the linguistic and dental differences
among populations.

Journal reference: Biology Letters (DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2006.0609)


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