Can the genetic history of Native Americans be traced back to one man?

[Lancelets_Cousin]

Hello everyone.

A couple of years ago I watched a show on the Discovery Channel about human evolution. One of the claims it made was that all Native Americans can be genetically linked to a single common male ancestor.
Knowing the Discovery Channel’s propensity for BS, I thought this was a suspicious claim. It is possible that I misunderstood the narrator. Is this true?

[Odinoneeye]

When you say Native Americans, do you mean any peoples from North or South America, or just he ones that came from what is now the United States?

I have no cites for this, but I unless I’ve missed something, there are still a few different theories for how the New World was populated. Some people think that several different cultures arrived here in different locations and spread from several areas. Some think that the original people came from Russia, through Alaska.

[Ice_Wolf]

Hmm. I thought it was mitachondrial links they were looking for – and that the theory is we’re supposed to hail from a few women, the daughters of Eve?

[Lancelets_Cousin]

If the show was accurate on that part than someone here would have at least heard of the theory, I’m sure. I really just wanted to clear that up. I tried searching google but my results were flooded with too many “self-test” Indian dna kits(?). But thanks for the replies.

[tomndebb]

It was not all indigenous peoples of the Americas, but it was a substantial number. The “genetic archaeology” speculates that there was a mutation in one strand of Y-chromosome DNA in which one molecule shifted from cytosine to thymine. Currently, about half of all males of indigenous American ancestry carry that thymine marker which is found in no other population in the world (except, possibly, a small number of Eastern Siberians).

The point is not that one man “fathered” America, but that one of the many male ancestors of Americans pased on a unique marker.

(Consider your family extending back three generations. You have four great-grandfathers, but you only carry the name of one of them.* The tyhmine shift is similar to the patrilineal name, in that its presence is a distinct indicator of one ancestor, but that it does not preclude the other ancestors from having contributed to your existence.)

• (For the purposes of this discussion, we are using the typical naming protocol found in the U.S. If you are from a region that practices matrilineal descent, multiple parent name adoption, or random assignment of surnames, simply pretend, for this exercise, that you are a Yank named Smith descended from John Smith, Aloysius Przbilski, Zahirud Babur, and Wu Biao and that John Smith is your father’s father’s father.)

[Lancelets_Cousin]

Thanks tomndebb. That was the SD style answer I was really hoping for. It is a far cry from what I heard on the DC, but i bet that was the origin of the statement.

[Dunderman]

Cecil’s view:

recent research suggests that Native Americans lacked “genetic diversity”–bluntly put, that they were inbred, virtually the entire indigenous population of the Americas having descended from just four (4) women–or at least four groups of closely related women

[Squink]

There’s an interesting bit on mitochondrial mutations involved in cold adaptation over at the NY Times today:Ice Age Ancestry May Keep Body Warmer and Healthier

A team of California geneticists has found that many of the world’s peoples are genetically adapted to the cold because their ancestors lived in northern climates during the Ice Age. The genetic change affects basic body metabolism and may influence susceptibility to disease and to the risks of the calorie-laden modern diet.
…
The genetic adaptation to cold is still carried by many Northern Europeans, East Asians and American Indians, most of whose ancestors once lived in Siberia. But it is absent from peoples native to Africa…

[Will_Repair]

Ice Wolf’s book Seven Daughters of Eve traces mtDNA, or DNA inherited from mother to daughter. This book will tell you the originial woman.

Journey of Man, also a PBS show, traces DNA of the Y chromosome. This book will tell you the originial man.

[Lancelets_Cousin]

I was starting to think that I completely imagined what I heard on The Discovery Channel. I recall the program announcing the view with little room for conjecture, which is why I was skeptical of the claim. It’s good to have recources like this on the internet.
As long as we are mentioning books on the subject, I would like to recommend Jared Diamond’s Of Guns, Germs And Steel. In it Mr Diamond argues that the reason Europeans spread genocidal diseases to the New World inhabitatants, rather than vice versa, is due more to the domestication of animals and the greater population densities of Europeans. In this theory, European lifestyle allowed diseases to be contracted via animals into the dense population centers of Europe. Coevolution of diseases to adapt to their human host, and their human host to evolve resistence over time was a compelling argument to the question asked of Mr. Adams in Priceguy’s link.

[netscape_6]

all this goes to show you clean living will get you wiped out.