Genetic studies link indigenous peoples in the Amazon and Australasia

An indigenous Xavante midwife. Credit: Agência Brasil


Native Americans living in the Amazon bear an unexpected genetic connection to indigenous people in Australasia,
suggesting a previously unknown wave of migration to the Americas thousands of years ago, a new study has found.
"It's incredibly surprising," said David Reich, Harvard Medical School professor of genetics and senior author of the study. "There's a strong working model in archaeology and genetics, of which I have been a proponent, that most Native Americans today extend from a single pulse of expansion south of the ice sheets—and that's wrong. We missed something very important in the original data."


Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-07-genetic-link-indigenous-peoples-amazon.html#jCp