Genetic Evidence against a Paleolithic European Contribution to Past or Present Native Americans

ABSTRACT

Modern and ancient genomics have recently ignited new debates in the field of peopling of the Americas, sometimes bringing up some odd scenarios. One of those is the Solutrean hypothesis. We argue that not only is the archaeological evidence supporting it rather tentative, but also it is not possible to reconcile what is known about the genetics of past and present Native Americans with the occurrence of a transatlantic dispersal during the late Pleistocene.

KEYWORDS:

• Peopling of Americas
• Solutrean hypothesis
• transatlantic dispersal
• genetic analysis
• phylogeography

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the Q Nordic Family Tree DNA group project (http://www.familytreedna.com/groups/qnordic/about), and Arne Solli, Kate Reed, Kim Dawtry, and Jakob Norstedt for helpful comments and discussion and for the geographical location of Q-L804 samples in Europe. The authors also thank Brad Lepper for recommending the journal PaleoAmerica.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Thomaz Pinotti is a biologist and PhD student (double degree) at University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG), Brazil. Thomaz finished his MSc in 2019 with a dissertation about genomic approaches to the first settlement of Americas, particularly South America.

Fabrício R. Santos is biologist and professor of genetics and evolution at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG) in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Dr Santos obtained his PhD at UFMG in 1995, and was post–doctoral fellow on Human Evolution at Oxford University, UK, between 1995–1997, and at National Geographic Society and University of Pennsylvania, USA, in 2008. He is a bioanthropologist working with historical genetics of the peopling of Americas since 1993.

ORCID

Thomaz Pinotti http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2695-143X

Fabrício R. Santos http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9088-1750

Additional information

Funding

The authors were supported by FAPEMIG, CAPES, and CNPq funding agencies of Brazil.