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Peopling of the Americas as inferred from ancient genomics

Nature volume 594, pages 356–364 (2021)Cite this article

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Abstract

In less than a decade, analyses of ancient genomes have transformed our understanding of the Indigenous peopling and population history of the Americas. These studies have shown that this history, which began in the late Pleistocene epoch and continued episodically into the Holocene epoch, was far more complex than previously thought. It is now evident that the initial dispersal involved the movement from northeast Asia of distinct and previously unknown populations, including some for whom there are no currently known descendants. The first peoples, once south of the continental ice sheets, spread widely, expanded rapidly and branched into multiple populations. Their descendants—over the next fifteen millennia—experienced varying degrees of isolation, admixture, continuity and replacement, and their genomes help to illuminate the relationships among major subgroups of Native American populations. Notably, all ancient individuals in the Americas, save for later-arriving Arctic peoples, are more closely related to contemporary Indigenous American individuals than to any other population elsewhere, which challenges the claim—which is based on anatomical evidence—that there was an early, non-Native American population in the Americas. Here we review the patterns revealed by ancient genomics that help to shed light on the past peoples who created the archaeological landscape, and together lead to deeper insights into the population and cultural history of the Americas.

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Fig. 1: Ancient whole-genomes and genome-wide SNP capture analyses from the Americas.
Fig. 2: Schematic of the processes of human dispersal and divergence into and within the Americas in the Pleistocene.
Fig. 3: Schematic of the processes of human dispersal and divergence into and within the Americas in the Holocene, and to the Caribbean Islands and Greenland in the late Holocene.

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Acknowledgements

We thank M. Adler, R. Kelly, D. Mann, V. Moreno-Mayar, T. Pinotti, M. Raghavan, H. Schroeder, M. Sikora and M. Vander Linden for providing comments and advice on this paper, and V. Moreno-Mayar and K. Kjær for help with the figures; M. Avila-Arcos, T. Dillehay, C. Lalueza-Fox and B. Llamas for their detailed and constructive comments; and St John’s College, Cambridge University, where E.W. is a Fellow and D.J.M. was a Beaufort Visiting Scholar, for providing a stimulating environment in which the idea and much of the work on this manuscript took place. E.W. thanks Illumina for collaboration. E.W. is financially supported by the Wellcome Trust, the Lundbeck Foundation, the Carlsberg Foundation and the Novo Nordic Foundation. D.J.M.’s research is supported by the Quest Archaeological Research Fund and the Potts & Sibley Foundation.

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  1. These authors contributed equally: Eske Willerslev, David J. Meltzer

Authors and Affiliations

  1. GeoGenetics Group, Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Eske Willerslev

  2. Lundbeck Foundation GeoGenetics Centre, GLOBE Institute, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Eske Willerslev & David J. Meltzer

  3. Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Cambridge, UK

    Eske Willerslev

  4. Department of Anthropology, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX, USA

    David J. Meltzer

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  1. Eske Willerslev
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E.W. and D.J.M. conceived and wrote the manuscript. The authors contributed equally to this work.

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Correspondence to Eske Willerslev or David J. Meltzer.

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Peer review information Nature thanks Maria Avila-Arcos, Tom Dillehay, Carles Lalueza-Fox and Bastien Llamas for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Willerslev, E., Meltzer, D.J. Peopling of the Americas as inferred from ancient genomics. Nature 594, 356–364 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03499-y

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