If I suspend my controversial theory for a split second, then the data presented in the paper under discussion correlates with the following three pieces of data.

1) Ancient Amerindian skulls (Lagoa Santa, Sabana de Bogotá, Toca dos Coqueiros, etc.) tend to differ considerably from modern Amerindian skulls. Physical anthropologists compare the former to Australia, Oceania and the Ainu, and the latter to recent Mongoloids. Ancient American teeth show the same association with Australo-Melanesians as the skulls. I remember when I brought this issue up with Richard Klein, he was absolutely positive that the radical difference between the metrics of ancient and modern Amerindian skulls means two separate populations, representing two separate migrations, colliding in the Americas.

2) North American and South American kinship systems are quite different from each other, with the first containing signals of long-term exogamy, and the latter of long-term endogamy. In South America, only the Mapuche show a clear North American pattern, with Ge and Panoan being ambiguous.

3) American Indian mtDNA variation falls into two superclades/macrohaplogroups, M (C, D, M*) and N (A, X, B). Scholars have noticed that, although all haplogroups are represented from Tierra del Fuego to North America, the frequencies fluctuate considerably between South and North America. Roughly speaking, M lineages dominate in South America, while N lineages dominate in North America. (B is somewhat of an exception from this pattern, being mostly concentrated along the western coastal line, with some Andean populations having this lineage at fixation.) In certain areas of South America, such as Ecuador, the penetration of N lineages appears to have happened within the last 5,000 years. The colliding of two populations in America may have resulted in prolonged admixture and gene flow that leveled the frequencies out and made the Amerindian variation look as if it were a result of a single migration.

These three pieces of evidence seems to sit well with the copying model analysis, with South America and North America representing epicenters of two distinct population dispersals separated in time by thousands of years. However one of the challenges that mtDNA presents to any multiple-migration model is that American Indian lineages, although belonging to two different macroclades, are phylogenetically very closely related to each other. With the exception of B, all of them share the ancestral state of site 16223 (C), which in the Old World splits all Eurasian sequences into the Western (European) with 16223T and Eastern (Asian) clades with 16223C.

The Genographic Project is attempting to obtain DNA (through community consultation) from both Australian and New Zealand natives. As far as I know they haven’t collected any Australian samples yet, and I’d expect it to be an uphill battle for them to do so.

Yeah the Australian Aborigines are a critical population but the HGDP has a lot of missing groups. I don’t know why they weren’t included in the main release. It seems surprising because the main goal of the HGDP is to map the genetic variation between humans, which is less than 1% different. Leaving out such a homogenous population seems like ignoring out a very large part of their research focus. Maybe someone out there affiliated with the HGDP can shed some light on this question?

I did some research, and there have been some claims that the HGDP halted because of protests from organizations like the ETC Group, which drained support for the HGDP. Many of the protests stemmed off of the applications of the HGDP results, i.e. fear of racisms, consent, patenting. etc. If true, the resource draining by way of protests could be one reason why many groups were left out.

I hope that the project will continue. I also hope the next release of the HGDP will include Aborigines as as well as some other populations.

Kambiz