Read reviews of science articles, new research and news reports on ancestry testing, ancient DNA and popular genetics
We continue the series of reports on Phase II of our Cherokee DNA Project with case histories for the various haplogroups in the study. Case Histories: Where There’s Smoke
Because of its length, our long-awaited report on Phase II of the Cherokee DNA Project is being published in installments. Part I deals with the background of American Indian haplogroup analysis and the “peopling of the Americas” hypothesis that has prevailed in genetics since 1993. Part Two will describe our procedure and methodology.
I grew up in the Southwest in Richmond, California. My father was from Guayama, Puerto Rico, and my mother was from Maui, Hawaii. My paternal great grandparents kept a diary and worked in the sugarcane, tobacco, and coffee fields and told stories of the Taino Indians from the island of Boriken near Puerto Rico. My mother’s side migrated to Hawaii from Spain and Puerto Rico to work in the pineapple and sugar cane fields. My mom and relatives were in Pearl Harbor and some served in WWII.
Postings from the Edge
By Donald N. Yates
They called her Mother Qualla—a stately, bluish-gray skinned schoolteacher in New York with angular features, thin lips and quick, intelligent eyes. Brian Wilkes and I drove her to her motel room at a meeting of the Southwestern Cherokee Confederacy in Albany, Georgia.
The most important human skeleton found in North America has finally been given a reprieve from legal obstacles to be studied and the resulting information published. In an article by Douglas Preston in Smithsonian Magazine titled “The Kennewick Man Finally Freed to Share His Secrets,” the amazing story of the 9,000 year-old skeleton—and the enormous lengths to which the government and tribal protesters went to block it—is told for the first time.
In the days before standardization of railway gauges, passengers were sometimes obliged to get out of the railcar when the tracks reached a border and climb aboard a waiting train on the next set of rails, which were broader or narrower in design.
Rare Chinese Allele Found Among Southwestern U.S. Hispanics and North Mexican Indians
Like about 5 percent of North Americans, Francesca Serrano was adopted and never knew her birth parents. Wishing to find out her ancestry, she took ourDNA Fingerprint Plus, an autosomal test based on an analysis of STR frequencies that can suggest overall ancestry matches to world populations. The caseworker who prepared her report was amazed at all the apparent Chinese ancestry mixed with Hispanic and Native American.
By and large, the genetics literature on American Indians has been confined to small, scattered samples gleaned from modern groups. This morass of information is vast, growing, and inconclusive.
Attempting to present the “peopling of the Americas” from such a reductive approach is like playing a game of Solitaire with important cards missing.
Did the Chinese Settle in Northern Mexico and the American Southwest?
We had just finished a meal of delicious fish tacos at what was to become our favorite Mexican restaurant on the Southside of Phoenix. The cook and owner was a lady from Sinaloa. She asked what I did for a living, and when I told her DNA testing, she immediately said, “I imagine our DNA in Mexico is a combination of Spanish, Indian and Chinese, right?”
We often are asked, “How does your ancestry analysis work,” and “What makes it different from other methods?” Principal Investigator Donald Yates was recently interviewed along these lines and here are his answers.
