A recent (pay-per-view) paper in Nature may shed light on both dates of early Amerindians and the mutation rate of the Y-chromosome. Dienekes’ blog comments on the paper. (He finds it “remarkable that this ~13 thousand year old genome now exists while the genomes of modern native Americans that can be had for a fraction of the cost and technical difficulty do not.”) A blog comment quotes from the paper
That was my first guess too - that you start in Africa and go as far out as you can. But as Blake has pointed out, Africans are our common ancestors, so they’re actually in the middle. They’re more closely related to everyone than anyone else. They’re on the trunk of the family tree. To find the most unrelated, you have to go up two branches of the tree that are far away. Or to use another simplistic analogy, you are more closely related to your great grandmother than you are to your second cousin whose common ancestor is your great grandmother. So the candidates for least-related would be, say, Australian aborigines and native Americans.
No, not really. Non-Africans descend from a small group of Africans (presumably somewhere in East Africa) and are most closely related to that small group (and their descendants) than they are to other Africans groups and their descendants.
IOW, at the base of our species tree is “all Africans, about 200K years ago”, but at the base of the tree for those of us who are non-Africans is “a small group of Africans about 60K years ago”. But that is still a bit simplistic and ignores much interbreeding not only within our own species, but also with other species (or populations, if you prefer).
That’s what I meant.
Yes, the question is fraught with danger.
You said the opposite.
I don’t think you understand how this works. The San aren’t on the trunk, they’re at the tip of first branch. And for that matter there isn’t any “trunk,” it’s all branches at different levels. The San are equally distantly related to everyone at the tips of all other branches - who are more closely related to anyone else than they are to San. (This is ignoring any admixture of the San with Bantu later on.)
This phylogenetic tree may make the situation clearer.
I don’t think I did.
Never mind. I knew using a family tree analogy was simplistic. I should have known someone would object.
I’ve underlined the key point. Note that the phylogenetic chart Colibri just linked to is for mt-DNA only. Even clading charts based on autosomal data will be misleading since they cannot depict the multi-dimensionality that arises from having a plurality (2) of parents.
A better answer to OP’s question is shown in the clustering diagram in the paper I linked to upthread. I wish someone had quoted that since it’s obvious many in the thread have me set to Ignore. :smack:
This is what you said, which if not exactly the opposite is definitely wrong.
You said the same to me in a pm. It’s just a message board. Sometimes people skim or misunderstand or express themselves badly or convey the opposite of what they intend or get things badly wrong. Just… move on. It’s not that important.
I’m not overly concerned that I’m ignored. I’m just trying to help fight ignorance. Your responding personally (not to mention violating the presumed confidentiality of PMs) rather than endorsing the correct solution to OP’s question which I’ve provided, is an example of the problem, not its solution.
Interactive map of human genetic history
Knock yourself out 
One of the more interestinig tidbits is that the map confirms Kalash people claim - curently, in Pakistan - that they are of Greek origin.
I apologize; I hadn’t realized there was a presumed confidentiality. I thought they were private in the neutral sense of “not public” rather than more specificaly “secret.”
I can’t speak to the genetics issues.
The Bantu migrations. They came out of West Africa in the last ~3000 years.
Even free registration for that paper seems to require accepting that they send you email notices, which I wasn’t willing to do (although I could probably access the article through other means).
Considering degree of admixture is perhaps a more nuanced way to look at it, but how exactly are you defining degree of relatedness?
If you consider both time of lineage separation and the degree of isolation from admixture with other populations, then the probable answer is the Andamese Islanders. As another link indicated, even the San show admixture with non-African populations.
Another possibility is some Pygmy groups, which diverged about as long ago as San. However, gene flow with adjacent groups has probably been mostly one way, with female Pygmies but not males entering Bantu populations and little if any Bantu mixture into Pygmy populations.
But many sub-Saharan Africans are not Bantu, and they used to ALL be called Negroes. The Bantu are indubitably a group, but there are many other groups within “Black Africans” or “African Negroes” or equivalent terms. It’s only a unified whole from a certain Western perspective that’s no longer current in academic or scientific circles.
I made no such claim, the cites made that claim. I was just quoting the figures from the cites.
My first cite made the claim “Giant sloths were eaten by a population living in Uruguay 30,000 years ago, suggesting humans arrived in the Americas far earlier than previously thought, according to a new study.”
Here’s the actual article:
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/281/1774/20132211
So, 30000 years ago is the claim of: Richard A. Fariña, P. Sebastián Tambusso, Luciano Varela, Ada Czerwonogora, Mariana Di Giacomo, Marcos Musso, Roberto Bracco and Andrés Gascue, not me.
And from the Smithsonian article, :
“Stanford and Bradley say evidence for the Solutreans’ presence in America includes stone artifacts gathered by archaeologists at several sites on the eastern shore of Chesapeake Bay, all producing dates more than 20,000 years old. Most of the dates were derived from organic material found with the artifacts. The exception was a mastodon tusk with attached bone and teeth netted by a fisherman in 1974, along with a laurel leaf-shaped stone knife. Stanford found the tusk to be 22,760 years old. Among other things, the Solutrean hypothesis provides context not only for the Clovis people, but also for North America’s pre-Clovis sites.”
So, whether or not there are disputes here, we have published degreed professionals making *claims *for 20-30K years in peer reviewed scientific journals. Maybe THEIR claims are disputed, but it’s their claims, not my claims. I have not done a single dig since college, I make no claims. My last paper published was a survey of littoral organisms, hardly anything in this genre.
[Moderating]
There’s no rule against disclosing the contents of PMs, although it’s probably better not to reveal them without permission. septimus, I’ll note that your remark about “I suppose people have me on ignore” was unnecessarily contentious for this forum. In any case, let’s drop the personal dispute.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Come on, if you would* read*, you can see those are cites about how much the sea level has risen in the last 10-20000 years. :rolleyes:
Your statement of “almost certainly 20000” is a claim by you that such a figure is generally accepted. As I said, there is no scientific consensus that dates that old are valid. If you are going to make such claims, you should be clearer that they are at best very uncertain.
So? When sea level was lowest, glaciation was at its maximum, potentially blocking routes into the Americas beyond Beringia. The time of lowest sea levels does not necessarily correspond to when migration was most feasible.