April 30, 2016

More on Kennewick Man

A new technical report re-analyzes the data of Rasmussen et al. study on Kennewick man and confirms that he is related to Native Americans. From the report:
We find the Kennewick sample has the highest shared similarity to Native American populations with the highest values observed being with populations from South America (Figure 7), in line with the observations from Rasmussen et al.
Hopefully this will end the campaign to put him back to the ground. I have added a horizontal line to the new study's Figure 7 to mark the population claiming the skeleton among the huge number considered, showing that there's no particularly strong relationship to it (the strongest connection is at the bottom of the figure).


The Rasmussen et al. and Novembre et al. studies are really science working at its best: simultaneously falsifying claims that Kennewick was some sort of Australoid (or even more implausibly Caucasoid) based on its craniofacial morphology, but not overreaching to validate emotional appeals to make him into an ancestor he wasn't. Thankfully, the way forward is to keep studying Kennewick Man (and modern Native Americans) with ever-better data and techniques which may turn up (who knows?) a real (rather than imagined) ancestral link.


Technical Report: Assessment of the genetic analyses of Rasmussen et al. (2015)

John Novembre, PhD, David Witonsky, Anna Di Rienzo, PhD

The primary aim of the analysis undertaken here (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, St Louis District Contract #W912P9-16-P-0010) is to provide an independent validation of the genetic evidence underlying a recent publication by Morten Rasmussen and colleagues on July 23rd, 2015, in Nature (Vol 523:455–58). Based on our analysis of the Kennewick Man’s sequence data and Colville tribe genotype data generated by Rasmussen et al., we concur with the findings of the original paper that the sample is genetically closer to modern Native Americans than to any other population worldwide. We carried out several analyses to support this conclusion, including (i) principal component analysis (PCA; Patterson et al. 2006), (ii) unsupervised genetic clustering using ADMIXTURE (Alexander, Novembre, and Lange 2009), (iii) estimation of genetic affinity to modern human populations using f3 and D statistics (Patterson et al. 2012), and (iv) a novel approach based on the geographic distribution of rare variants. Importantly, these distinct analyses, spanning three non-overlapping subsets of the data, are each consistent with Native American ancestry.

Link

5 comments:

Dr. Clyde Winters said...

This report when you check other data does not make Kennewick related to modern Native Americans, instead of Australasians. Novembre et al (2015) claims that genetically Kennewick man is related to the Karitiana. A relationship between the Karitiana and Kennewick falsifies their hypothesis. It is falsified because Skoglund et al (2015) found that the Karitiana and other Amozonian people in South America have an Australasian heritage. The identification of a relationship between Kennewick man and the Karitiana, more so than any other American population, would continue to situate this Native American in the Paleoamerican group--not contemporary Native Americans who most resemble mongoloids, rather than the Australoid, Polynesian and Sub-Saharan African types associated with the Paleoamericans.

Reference:

Skoglund et al (2015), Genetic evidence for two founding populations of the Americas , NATURE ,525 ( 3 SEPTEMBER):104-108. Retrieved 5/1/2016 at : http://www.nature.com/articles/nature14895.epdf?referrer_access_token=4TuRenNBfBRS7tHNMAY1qdRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0N6yB-nEyCdRoL51ykMO5E9z_7mdrRF_UTJvxtpDQnayOfwuJnrOCxIhdm8_7djDnDo9Obq-VbpDatHfBozg8WnuFcDDHGC6D1QQbbgmyediLKefzmJLdqOP9IYieqkoaey_M8XA-n4Ua9CD3IbOslIqWUnXzIWbLwafl9bJMOQNAJlELt6cfooH162H7W_3B8%3D&tracking_referrer=mobile.nytimes.com

Doog said...

"the way forward is to keep studying Kennewick Man (and modern Native Americans) with ever-better data and techniques which may turn up (who knows?) a real (rather than imagined) ancestral link"

That's probably not going to happen, sadly. Because the words "related to" and "native american" appeared, the tribes are going to petition his reburial. And given how Anzick 1 and Buhl Woman were both repatriated without a strong link, Kennewick Man's days are likely numbered.

Joyce said...

@Dr. Winters, so you reject genetics completely. Who are "Australasians'? Polynesians are "admixtures" between East Asians(Y haplo O?) and Melanesians. Australian Aborigines did not have "bow and arrow" before they were isolated, much earlier than peopling of America. Because mtDNA B is not common in Northern Asia now, it has been speculated that some Polynesians reached central America in boat. Some believe that central Americans continued to have contact with Polynesians because of crops, but I believe that Agriculture probably started very early in East Asia (earlier expansion of population) because both Chinese and Central Americans were very serious about their lunar calendars. Dogs had long been believed to be domesticated in Middle East until genetic studies, top three possible sites are southern China(number 1), northern China and Siberia. Dogs seem related to European grey wolves, well, wolves might not have known that they were European and stayed in Europe. Besides, Ice Age "Europeans" mostly carries Aisans Y and mtDNA.

Doog said...

@Joyce: Australasia is a term referring to the region occupied by Australia, New Zealand, and most of Indonesia (excluding Borneo, Java and Sumatra). So by extension, Australasians are the people inhabiting that region.

terryt said...

"Australasia is a term referring to the region occupied by Australia, New Zealand, and most of Indonesia (excluding Borneo, Java and Sumatra)".

Usually 'Australasia' includes only New Zealand and Australia, and usually New Guinea and the islands of Melanesia very close to it. The problem for using it as a genetic region is that it has undergone at least three separate and independent migrations into it from west of Wallace's Line. This raises the problem:

"the Karitiana and other Amozonian people in South America have an Australasian heritage".

Which Australasians are you specifically referring to?