Paradigm Reinforced and Refined With Ancient Paleo-Eskimo DNA

The details of Paleo-Eskimo migration to North America, which, it turns involves a single post-Founding population wave of pre-Columbian migration ca. 3000 BCE, and the extent to which modern people have ancestry from Paleo-Eskimos, is become more clear as the paradigm is confirmed and refined with new modern and ancient DNA evidence.

Much of the American Arctic was first settled 5,000 years ago, by groups of people known as Palaeo-Eskimos. They were subsequently joined and largely displaced around 1,000 years ago by ancestors of the present-day Inuit and Yup’ik. The genetic relationship between Palaeo-Eskimos and Native American, Inuit, Yup’ik and Aleut populations remains uncertain. 

Here we present genomic data for 48 ancient individuals from Chukotka, East Siberia, the Aleutian Islands, Alaska, and the Canadian Arctic. We co-analyse these data with data from present-day Alaskan Iñupiat and West Siberian populations and published genomes. 

Using methods based on rare-allele and haplotype sharing, as well as established techniques, we show that Palaeo-Eskimo-related ancestry is ubiquitous among people who speak Na-Dene and Eskimo–Aleut languages. We develop a comprehensive model for the Holocene peopling events of Chukotka and North America, and show that Na-Dene-speaking peoples, people of the Aleutian Islands, and Yup’ik and Inuit across the Arctic region all share ancestry from a single Palaeo-Eskimo-related Siberian source.

From Pavel Flegontov, et al., "Palaeo-Eskimo genetic ancestry and the peopling of Chukotka and North America" Nature (June 5, 2019).

Bernard's blog (in French) discusses some of the details not available on an open access basis in the body text and reproduces some of the key figures from the paper.