Genome-wide data substantiate Holocene gene flow from India to Australia

The Cherokee called them the Moon People. The Utes and Paiutes spoke of a hideous race of cannibals ten feet tall living in caves. And the Choctaw also have an account of the race of giants that first colonized the Ohio Valley. 

From Old World Roots of the Cherokee, chapter 5, "America's Middle Ages," pp. 78-79, we read:

What kind of Indians lived in the territory the Choctaw and Chickasaw carved out for their new home? According to their traditions, reports Cushman, as confirmed by excavations of bones in Tennessee, it was a “race of white giants”:

[T]he tradition of the Choctaws . . . told of a race of giants that once inhabited the now State of Tennessee, and with whom their ancestors fought when they arrived in Mississippi in their migration from the west, doubtless Old Mexico. Their tradition states the Nahullo (race of giants [literally, wizards]) was of wonderful stature; but, as their tradition of the mastodon [which used to be found on the Great Plains], so this was also considered to be but a foolish fable, the creature of a wild imagination, when lo! Their exhumed bones again prove the truth of the Choctaws’ tradition (151).

These giants could have been Rafinesque’s Atlans.

Cushman then recounts the discovery in 1880 at a burial mound site near Plano, Texas, of human bones “of enormous size . . . the femoral bones being five inches longer than the ordinary length, and the jaw bones . . . so large as to slip over the face of a man with ease.” Cushman goes on to identify them with the older occupants of North America called Allegewi or Taligewi (Talegans). Many historians, moreover, speculate they were the builders of the Adena mounds.

As for the Chickasaw, Cushman notes that they have no record of their history before the colonial period, although it is assuredly "the same as the Choctaws, being one tribe and people until the division made by their two chiefs Chikasah and Chahtah many years after their arrival and location east of the Mississippi River" (p 358). Of the Natchez, Cushman records that they, "if tradition may be believed, also came from Mexico where they had lived for centuries" (p 440).

A story was told by the Comanches in 1857: 

Innumerable moons ago, a race of white men, ten feet high, and far more rich and powerful than any white people now living, here inhabited a large range of country, extending from the rising to the setting sun. Their fortifications crowned the summits of the mountains, protecting their populous cities situated in the intervening valleys. They excelled every other nation which was flourished, either before or since, in all manner of cunning handicraft—were brave and warlike—ruling over the land they had wrested from its ancient possessors with a high and haughty hand. Compared with them the palefaces of the present day were pygmies, in both art and arms. They drove the Indians from their homes, putting them to the sword, and occupying the valleys in which their fathers had dwelt before them since the world began. At length, in the height of their power and glory, when they remembered justice and mercy no more and became proud and lifted up, the Great Spirit descended from above, sweeping them with fire and deluge from the face of the earth. The mounds we [i.e. the speaker Chief Rolling Thunder and his Spanish listener] had seen on the tablelands were the remnants of their fortresses, and the crumbling ruins that surrounded us all that remained of a mighty city.[i]

The word Nahoolo or Nahullo “is now emphatically applied to the white race and no other . . . The Nahullo were of white complexion, according to Choctaw tradition, and were still an existing people at the time of the advent of the Choctaws to Mississippi,” concludes Cushman (p 153) . In agreement, the Indian trader Adair often refers to the Nani Ishtahoolo as departed white ghosts vested with spiritual powers whose descendants were priests and magicians. Their cries and magic spells could still be heard in the mounds like those at Ocmulgee.[ii] These references contribute to the suspicion that the “Indians” who preceded Asiatic tribes from Mexico were, as we would say today, Caucasian.

About exactly a year ago on this blog, we published a post about "Neanderthals in America," mentioning also the peculiar archaic skeleton that is now a roadside attraction in Arizona, called The Thing. In the meantime, we acquired a copy of Fritz Zimmerman's book, The Nephilim Chronicles, which reproduces over 300 historical accounts of Giant skeletons. Many are associated with the earliest mound sites in America, but Zimmerman's survey of this worldwide phenomenon ranges from the Hunter-Fisher People of northeast Europe and Red Paint People whose movements were circumpolar to the giants of the Bible, noted by the Babylonian Talmud as having double rows of teeth, and "Giants' Remains in the British Isles" (pp. 157-65).

Navajo legends speak of the Starnake People, a regal race of white giants endowed with mining technology who dominated the West, enslaved lesser tribes and had strongholds all through the Americas. They were either extinguished or "went back to the heavens." The name may be a corruption of the Biblical race known as Anakim (Num. 13:33, Deut. 1:28). The name Og (Hebrew "chief") appears to be characteristic (see Zimmerman, pp. 188-91). The ogham alphabet is attributed to this cultural founder. 

Certainly, many of the mound sites uncovered in the nineteenth century tell a story of constant warfare by incoming Asiatic tribes  against the giants occupying the land. One grisly scene showed thousands of skeletons, male, female and young heaped in a mass grave, with warriors' skulls pierced by arrows. It would appear that as these aboriginal inhabitants of the Ohio Valley were gradually displaced, some members of their society went over into the ranks of the new conquerors, bequeathing a strain of great stature still noticeable, for instance, in the Mobilian chief Tuscaloosa and DeSoto's Indian queen Cofitachiqui, both of whom were said to be seven feet tall.

We are struck by the following traits of this giant race or ethnic group from human prehistory:

• Mother Goddess religion
• Copper (not bronze) axes 
• Polished slate tools including fishing plummets, which were apparently regarded as sacred
• Belief that the Grandmother Moon was the repository of souls
• Diet emphasizing shellfish (for which the double row of teeth probably was selected as an evolutionary advantage in their beachcomber origin out of Africa?)
• Building of fish weirs in North American rivers to trap migrating eels
• Certain vegetarian habits (wild rice, for instance)
• Inscriptions on artifacts, especially pipes, often buried with the dead
• Use of coal and petroleum
• Weaving and looms
• Knowledge of seafaring, mathematics and engineering, including canals and irrigation
• Burying of a dog with a child to guard the latter in the afterlife
• A language apparently Afro-Asiatic and close to Semitic tongues
• Kingcraft:  nobles were buried in seated positions on thrones surrounded by a coterie of their retainers

If you ask this question of the archeological establishment today, the answer you are likely to receive is something like "Darned, if we know!" 

Whoever they were, they appeared and disappeared suddenly with about 1500 years in between. Phoenix where the Salt and Gila rivers meet was their center, and the site of the present-day Pueblo Grande Museum and Archeological Park near Sky Harbor is believed to have been their capital city, with an area population at its height of 50,000 people--the greatest civilization of North America, excluding Mexico.

Their name means "the vanished ones" in the modern Pima Indian or O'odham language. The Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community located in the metropolitan Phoenix area now occupy the Hohokam homeland, although they and the related Papago (Tohono or Desert O'odham) are ambivalent about whether they are the descendants or conquerors of the Hohokam.

Harold Sterling Goodwin, who first discovered the Hohokam in his excavations of Snaketown in the 1920s, thought they were a Central American culture like the Maya or Zapotec. It is true that when they showed up about a century before the Common Era, they brought pottery, corn and beans agriculture and sophisticated canal irrigation, and that none of these arts indicate any preliminary or introductory stages of development in the Arizona archeological record. It would be 800 more years before the truly indigenous Indians (called Basketweavers) acquired pottery and the other appurtenances of civilization, including the village architecture we call Puebloan.

A giant in Southwestern archeology, Goodwin fell from grace in the 1940s when he had the audacity to disagree about the emerging picture of Basketweaver-Pueblo-Spanish cultural phases and persist in a diffusionist theory of prehistory emphasizing Austronesian migrations rather than Asiatic influences. He went on to write a synthesis of American Indian studies titled A History of the Ancient Southwest (1957), a straightforward survey of the ancient civilizations that were overrun by the Uto-Aztecan, Navajo and Apache intruders beginning about 1100.

Another bad boy of academia, Barry Fell, believed the Hohokam came from the Middle East and North Africa, where they had perfected adobe construction and canal irrigation of crops. Fell pointed to the parallels between Pima and Papago and Berber languages. 

The Salt and Gila Rivers ran year round when the Hohokam built their system of government and katchina-based religion. Some of the canals were 50 feet wide and 16 miles long. There were four or more networks of irrigation canals totaling more than a thousand miles long. Since they built grass huts and caliche-plastered mud mounds and villages, though, the footprint of the Hohokam today is mostly melted away by erosion, and their earliest habitation spots are forever lost in the changing shoreline. They used few timbers, so tree-ring chronologies cannot be applied to them.

Thus the Hohokam are likely to remain permanent mysteries to us. But a little hint:  if you read their name as Semitic, it means "Sea Peoples." Snaketown can be understood as "boat-town" as well as the modern local Indians' calque "place where there are lots of rattlesnakes."

Their genetic signature, at any event, seems to be haplogroup B, like the Maya, other Pueblo Indians and Southeast Asians.








  

 

"All the lights in the House of the High Priests of American Anthropology are out; all the doors and windows are shut and securely fastened (they do not sleep with their windows open for fear that a new idea might fly in); we have rung the bell of Reason, we have banged on the door with Logic, we have thrown the gravel of Evidence against their windows; but the only sign of life in the house is an occasional snore of Dogma. We are very much afraid that no one is going to come down and let us into the warm, musty halls where the venerable old ideas are nailed to the walls."

These biting words were penned by Harold Sterling Gladwin in Men out of Asia, the famous archeologist's most popular, non-technical work. Published in 1947, Gladwin's book presented a maverick view of the peopling of the Americas identifying five migrations of diverse races including Negrittoes and Austronesians to the New World. Heretically, he placed the first migration as early as 25,000 years ago and argued that the earliest colonists were Australoid. 

The reaction of his colleagues in the anthropological establishment was stony silence shading off into hrumps and pshaws of injured pride, for Gladwin illustrated Men out of Asia with campy cartoons by Campbell Grant making fun of the sacred keepers of knowledge at the Peabody Museum at Harvard, Carnegie Foundation and Smithsonian Institution. In one, the dean of Southwest and Maya archeology Alfred V. Kidder is depicted as Dr. Phuddy Duddy sitting in academic robes atop a whistle sounding the alarm of illogical chronology. In another, a bespectacled Gladwin and his tweedy friend Professor Earnest Hooton of Harvard are shown in the academic doghouse "by request." 

The Establishment is still uncomfortable about Gladwin, who died in 1983 after a distinguished career of more than 60 years. Although willing to praise his meticulous fieldwork on the Hohokam at Snaketown and exacting methodologies developed at the research center he founded at Gila Pueblo outside Globe, Arizona, they do not know quite what to say about his conclusions and hypotheses, which grew more adamant toward the end.  

The destroying angel of unorthodox theories, Stephen Williams of the Peabody Museum, can only think that Gladwin succumbed to his "whimsies" and grew soft-headed in his old age. "I have always regarded Men Out of Asia," Williams writes in Fantastic Archeology (p. 229), "as a sort of 'hyper-diffusionist' spoof."

We wonder whether the laddies in Harvard Yard and Castle on the Mall do not protest too much.

In a similar high-toned snipe, Williams dismisses the author of Pale Ink with its discussions of ancient records of Chinese explorations in America as "a sweet old lady (p. 185)."  Louis Leakey, who believed on the basis of the Calico Early Man excavations he organized in California that humans occupied North America as long ago as 400,000 years, comes in for like treatment. Williams implies that Leakey was senile and hurried in his judgment (p. 303). 

If a controversial interpretation of the archeological record cannot be debunked as lacking "soil truth" or the hard-won verities of the dig and thus being nothing but "armchair archeology," then one must resort to that time-honored device of the Ivy League sneer. For instance, Jeffrey Goodman's controversial American Genesis "mimics a scientific book very well" (p. 303), but it cannot possibly be taken seriously because, well, you know, no person in his right mind subscribes to a North American or Asian origin for humans! In addition to coming from a homely, unpatrician Western background, Goodman was also part Native American, which helped make him a pariah. 

But to the happily hidebound Dr. Phuddy Duddys, we say in the words of Blake:

Mock on, Mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau;

Mock on, Mock on, 'tis all in vain.

You throw the sand against the wind,

And the wind blows it back again.  

The winds of change may have the last laugh.

Everyone probably has wondered at some time what makes Aboriginal Australians different from other people, where they came from and how old their ethnic type is. Well, wonder no more. Following up on the previous post, "Australian Aboriginal DNA Gets Attention," this post will summarize the groundbreaking article in Science magazine, M. Rasmussen et al., "An Aboriginal Australian Genome Reveals Separate Human Dispersals into Asia" (Science 334, 7 Oct. 2011, 94-98).

First the abstract:

We present an Aboriginal Australian genomic sequence obtained from a 100-year-old lock of hair donated by an Aboriginal man from southern Western Australia in the early 20th century. We detect no evidence of European admixture and estimate contamination levels to be below 0.5%. We show that Aboriginal Australians are descendants of an early human dispersal into eastern Asia, possibly 62,000 to 75,000 years ago. This dispersal is separate from the one that gave rise to modern Asians 25,000 to 38,000 years ago. We also find evidence of gene flow between populations of the two dispersal waves prior to the divergence of Native Americans from modern Asian ancestors. Our findings support the hypothesis that present-day Aboriginal Australians descend from the earliest humans to occupy Australia, likely representing one of the oldest continuous populations outside Africa.

Above:  Aboriginal Men about 1900 from the Coranderrk Community. La Trobe Picture Collection.

This study of Aboriginals will be cited as a landmark case in genetics because the authors took especial care to disarm any criticism concerning possible admixture and contamination, achieved a stupendous rate of success in sequencing DNA sites and used smart comparators to verify their model of what makes Aboriginals different, including Neanderthals, Denisovans, Andamanese, Filipinos, Indians, Papua New Guineans and Melanesians. Fifty-eight co-authors are listed, with Morten Rasmussen of the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research, Manhasset, New York, named as the first lead author.

First sentence:

The genetic history of Aboriginal Australians is contentious but highly important for understanding the evolution of modern humans.

Some mysteries pointed out about Aboriginal Australian DNA by the authors include:

--The Aboriginal population contains a lot of diversity, including specimens of most of the world's haplogroups, male and female

--Related populations suggested are hunger-gatherers from Nepal and the Philippines, Great Andamanese and Onge from the Andaman Islands, Highland Papua New Guineans and certain peoples from India

--It was previously unclear whether Aboriginals resulted from a single dispersal out of Africa or multiple-dispersal model

--The role of hybridization with other archaic peoples was also not clear.

The authors confirm that "before European contact occurred, Aboriginal Australian and PNG Highlands ancestors had been genetically isolated from other populations (except possibly each other) since at least 15,000 to 30,000 years B.P." Also, "our results favor the multiple-dispersal model in which the ancestors of Aboriginal Australian and related populations split from the Eurasian population before Asian and Europeans split from each other" (97). "We find that the European and Asian populations split from each other only 25,000 to 38,000 years B.P., in agreement with previous estimates."

The new study finds that Aboriginals have an amount of admixture with Neanderthals and Denisovans comparable to Europeans and Asians, although they have more Denisovan DNA than other people. "This admixture may have occurred in Melanesia or, alternative, in Eurasia during the early migration wave" (97).

In sum, the Aboriginals are part of the same first-out-of-Africa branch of the human tree as Europeans and Asians, their ancestors splitting 62,000 to 75,000 years ago from Africans, and leaving relic related populations in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea and the Philippines. A second expansion wave through India, Indo-China and Southeast Asia replaced the original stock, while the Aboriginals became stranded and isolated in Australia about 50,000 years ago. 

"This means that Aboriginal Australians likely have one of the oldest continuous population histories outside sub-Saharan Africa today" (98).

Properly positioning Australian Aboriginals in the expansion of humans out of Africa opens the way to connecting the dots for all the other prehistoric peoples. The migration map presented by Rasmussen et al should be carefully studied for clues about the origins of Asians and Native Americans, to begin with.



Reconstruction of early spread of modern humans outside Africa. Note admixture between early dispersal (red) and second dispersal (black), as well as presence of archaic Denisovans in Asia. Science magazine.

Analysis of ancient nuclear DNA, recovered from 40,000-year-old remains in the Denisova Cave, Siberia, hints at the multifaceted interaction of human populations following their migration out of Africa.

The new discipline of palaeogenetics is delivering increasing dividends, the latest news coming from Reich, Pääbo and colleagues on page 1053 of this issue. The authors' analysis of nuclear DNA of a human-like finger bone, found in Denisova Cave in southern Siberia, points towards a complex model of migration and colonization after anatomically modern humans moved out of Africa some 50,000–60,000 years ago.

Ever since 1925, when Raymond Dart's report of the first Australopithecus skull in southern Africa upended Victorian views of human origins, there has been debate over whether our species arose only once and spread throughout the world, replacing all extant species of Homo, or whether our ancestors interbred with the other populations and subspecies. The most extreme version of the 'candelabra' model of human origins — according to which human species arose multiple times independently of our Homo ergaster ancestors — has been largely discounted.

But it has been difficult to assess more nuanced models, such as the possibility of genetic exchange with some archaic populations, including Neanderthals, and now perhaps ancient Siberians. Until recently, genetic data and interpretation of the fossil record seemed to favour a complete-replacement model, in which all human species trace all of their genetic ancestry to a single origin in one or more African populations of moderate size some 200,000 years ago2, 3, 4, 5. However, the Denisovan nuclear genome sequence, along with that of Homo neanderthalensis published by some of the same authors6, suggest that the out-of-Africa population history of Homo sapiens is probably much more intertwined than previously thought, with more intertwining in some parts of the world than others.

Read more and follow discussion at Nature.

Triangles and circles respectively represent sampling locations of Neanderthal remains and of present-day human genomes. The blue arrows indicate generally accepted major migrations of anatomically modern humans, following their departure from Africa 50,000–60,000 years ago. At this time, there were two primary archaic species in Eurasia, Neanderthals and Homo erectus; Reich, Pääbo and co-workerssuggest that a third group was also present, represented by the ancient Denisovan genome. From ancient DNA, they identify additional putative events involving two episodes of limited gene flow: first, genetic admixture from Neanderthals to modern humans, shortly after the exit from Africa; second, subsequent admixture with the archaic population exemplified by the nuclear DNA extracted from the Denisova finger bone. This second event seems to affect only the ancestors of present-day Melanesians, who are thought to have colonized Papua New Guinea some 45,000 years ago. African populations, both past and present, are genetically highly diverse, as indicated by the multiple labels.

See also "New Hominin Probably Explains Distinctiveness of Melanesians"

The Y-chromosome landscape of the Philippines: extensive heterogeneity and varying genetic affinities of Negrito and non-Negrito groups

Frederick Delfin1,2, Jazelyn M Salvador1, Gayvelline C Calacal1, Henry B Perdigon1, Kristina A Tabbada1, Lilian P Villamor1, Saturnina C Halos1, Ellen Gunnarsdóttir2, Sean Myles1,6, David A Hughes2, Shuhua Xu3, Li Jin3, Oscar Lao4, Manfred Kayser4, Matthew E Hurles5, Mark Stoneking2 and Maria Corazon A De Ungria1

European Journal of Human Genetics (2011) 19, 224–230; doi:10.1038/ejhg.2010.162; published online 29 September 2010

Abstract

The Philippines exhibits a rich diversity of people, languages, and culture, including so-called ‘Negrito’ groups that have for long fascinated anthropologists, yet little is known about their genetic diversity. We report here, a survey of Y-chromosome variation in 390 individuals from 16 Filipino ethnolinguistic groups, including six Negrito groups, from across the archipelago. We find extreme diversity in the Y-chromosome lineages of Filipino groups with heterogeneity seen in both Negrito and non-Negrito groups, which does not support a simple dichotomy of Filipino groups as Negrito vs non-Negrito. Filipino non-recombining region of the human Y chromosome lineages reflect a chronology that extends from after the initial colonization of the Asia-Pacific region, to the time frame of the Austronesian expansion. Filipino groups appear to have diverse genetic affinities with different populations in the Asia-Pacific region. In particular, some Negrito groups are associated with indigenous Australians, with a potential time for the association ranging from the initial colonization of the region to more recent (after colonization) times. Overall, our results indicate extensive heterogeneity contributing to a complex genetic history for Filipino groups, with varying roles for migrations from outside the Philippines, genetic drift, and admixture among neighboring groups.