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How continents shaped human culture

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Thaimon
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« on: October 09, 2011, 08:16:24 pm »

“Our understanding of the peopling of the Americas will be refined by archaeological data and additional genetic samples,” added Sohini Ramachandran, assistant professor of biology in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Brown and the paper’s lead author. “But this is the signature of migration we see from genetic data.”

To tease out the migration patterns, Ramachandran and fellow researcher Noah Rosenberg from Stanford gathered genetic markers for 68 indigenous populations from 678 genetic markers in Eurasia and the Americas. The goal was to study the distribution of genetic variation among populations. The similarity or difference in genetic make-up among populations gave the scientists insights about migrations long ago.

To illustrate, when one population breaks off from its parent group, the individuals in the new population take their genomes and any distinct genetic mutations with them. From there, the new population may remain independent of the parent group because of distance or other factors, and over time its genetic make-up diverges from the parent. However, if the new population reunites regularly with its parent population — known as “back migration” — the genetic make-up of the two populations remains relatively close.

“When populations do not share migrants with each other very often,” Rosenberg explained, “their patterns of genetic variation diverge.”
Testing the spread of innovation

Armed with the genetic background of cultures spanning the Americas and Eurasia, the researchers could test whether the east-west orientation of Eurasia supported a rapid spread of agriculture and other societal innovations, while the dissemination of those advances was slower in the Americas due to the north-south orientation. They found that to be the case: The populations in North and South America are, for the most part, more different from each other than the populations in Eurasia. The reason has to do with the differing climates that migrating peoples in the Americas found when they moved north to south.
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