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Wednesday, October 14, 2020

A new model for the genomic formation of First American ancestors in Asia (Ning et al. 2020 preprint)


Over at bioRxiv at this LINK. The main topic of the preprint is largely outside the scope of this blog. However, the manuscript includes a detailed discussion about how to get the most out of the qpAdm mixture modeling program. I've used qpAdm regularly over the years, and I plan to use it more often in the future, so I'll be looking very carefully at the qpAdm methodology that Ning et al. are recommending. Here's the preprint abstract:

Upward Sun River 1, an individual from a unique burial of the Denali tradition in Alaska (11500 calBP), is considered a type representative of Ancient Beringians who split from other First Americans 22000-18000 calBP in Beringia. Using a new admixture graph model-comparison approach resistant to overfitting, we show that Ancient Beringians do not form the deepest American lineage, but instead harbor ancestry from a lineage more closely related to northern North Americans than to southern North Americans. Ancient Beringians also harbor substantial admixture from a lineage that did not contribute to other Native Americans: Amur River Basin populations represented by a newly reported site in northeastern China. Relying on these results, we propose a new model for the genomic formation of First American ancestors in Asia.

Ning et al., The genomic formation of First American ancestors in East and Northeast Asia, bioRxiv, posted October 12, 2020, doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.10.12.336628

See also...

Ancient ancestry proportions in present-day Europeans

Major updates to ADMIXTOOLS

Yamnaya-related ancestry proportions in present-day Poles