Transmission of biology and culture among post-contact Native Americans on the western Great Plains

Abstract

The transmission of genes and culture between human populations has major implications for understanding potential correlations between history, biological, and cultural variation. Understanding such dynamics in 19th century, post-contact Native Americans on the western Great Plains is especially challenging given passage of time, complexity of known dynamics, and difficulties of determining genetic patterns in historical populations for whom, even today, genetic data for their descendants are rare. Here, biometric data collected under the direction of Franz Boas from communities penecontemporaneous with the classic bison-hunting societies, were used as a proxy for genetic variation and analyzed together with cultural data. We show that both gene flow and "culture flow" among populations on the High Plains were mediated by geography, fitting a model of isolation-by-distance. Moreover, demographic and cultural exchange among these communities largely overrode the visible signal of the prior millennia of cultural and genetic histories of these populations.