Named for the 12,000-year-old skeleton of a baby boy found in 1968 on a Montana ranch, and dubbed the Ancient One by local Indian groups, this marker corresponds to the earliest migrations of North Asiatic peoples into the Americas. Its distribution reflects a pattern of entry from Siberia to Alaska and a spread down the Pacific Coast to the extreme tip of South America. The presence of the Ancient One Gene in your DNA validly links you to Native American ancestry, though like all matches by the STR method the percentage of admixture cannot be exactly determined. At the north end of the range, the Dogrib Indians of Canada’s Northwest Territories carry the Ancient One’s signature in 83% of their tribespeople. South American Indians like the Ecuadorian Kichwas and Incas of Peru average a frequency around 50%, while in the middle are North and West Mexican Indians like the Huichols (75-83%). In the American Southwest the figures are: 68% of Navajo and 67% of Apache and Mojave. California’s Miwok Indians have the marker in 55% of their people. The incidence declines as you move eastward, so that the marker appears in 50% of Sioux and Choctaw, 45% of Chippewa, 40% of Lumbee and 38% of Cherokee. Overall, it is reported in 55% of the individuals surveyed for our reference population called North American Native Americans (n = 533).
