Peopling of the Americas, founded by four major lineages of mitochondrial DNA

Abstract

Nucleotide sequence analysis of the major noncoding region of human mitochondrial DNA from various races was extended with 72 Native Americans from 16 different local populations (nine populations from Chile, four from Colombia, and one each from Brazil and from Maya and Apache Indians). The sequences were determined directly from the polymerase chain reaction products. On the basis of a comparison of the 482-bp sequences in the 72 Native Americans, 43 different types of mitochondrial DNA sequences were observed. The nucleotide diversity within the Native Americans was estimated to be 1.29%, which is slightly less than the value of 1.44% from the total human population including Africans, Europeans, and Asians. Phylogenetic analysis revealed that most Native American lineages are classified into four major distinct clusters. Individuals belonging to each cluster share at least two specific polymorphic sites that are nearly absent in other human populations, indicating a unique phylogenetic position of Native Americans. A phylogenetic tree of 193 individuals including Africans, Europeans, Asians, and Native Americans indicated that the four Native American clusters are distinct and dispersed in the tree. These clusters almost exclusively consist of Native Americans - with only a few Asians, if any. We postulate that four ancestral populations gave rise to different waves of migration to the New World. From the estimated coalescence time of the Asian and Native American lineages, we infer that the first migration across the Bering landbridge took place ∼14,000-21,000 years ago. Furthermore, sequence differences in all pairwise comparisons of Native Americans showed a bimodal distribution that is significantly different from Poisson. These results suggest that the ancestral Native American population underwent neither a severe bottleneck nor rapid expansion in population size, during the migration of people into the Americas.