Genetic variation in North Amerindian populations: The geography of gene frequencies

Abstract

Ten-level synthetic gene frequency maps derived from a principal component analysis of seven polymorphic loci are displayed for a large sample of North Amerindian populations. These maps are useful for assessing population affinities over broad geographical regions and perhaps, as others have argued, for inferring recent migrations. The influence of European admixture is investigated by deleting highly admixed populations and regenerating the maps. In broad outline the resultant geographic patterning, while appearing more homogeneous, preserves many features of the maps that include the highly admixed samples--especially with respect to the Eskimo/non-Eskimo dichotomy. Further, in an effort to evaluate how varying the number of display levels affects patterning as well as interpretation, the maps were replotted at 5 and 20 levels. The 5-level maps are found to accentuate differences between the full data set and the less admixed data set, while the 20-level maps tend to obscure these differences.

Gene geography of South America: Testing models of population displacement based on archeological evidence

“…These graphic representations have been used to test models of the spread of early agriculture in Europe as well as hypotheses concerning population movements and the action of selective forces on a larger geographic scale (Piazza et al, 1980(Piazza et al, , 1981. More recently, Suarez et al (1985) and O'Rourke and Suarez (1985) constructed gene frequency maps for North, Central, and South America, in a n effort to correlate observed variation with possible migration routes and variables of local ecology.…”

Genetic variation in North Amerindian populations: Covariance with climate

“…However, generation of synthetic gene frequency maps (Suarez et al, 1985a) from North Amerindian gene frequency data provided little evidence for patterns of gene frequency variation concordant with migration patterns of much antiquity. The autocorrelation of migration, climate, and latitude may confound these analyses with only a slight augmentation of the correlations between genetic variation and climate.…”

“…Our samples for these groups come from populations still residing in the East rather than the western reservation groups. A list of populations, sample size, loci with missing values, and original references for the data used in this study may be found in Appendix I of Suarez et al (1985a).…”

Genetic variation in North Amerindian populations: Association with sociocultural complexity

“…Thirty-five of these were subsequently removed from the data base because (1) they were a replicate sample from a population already included in the data base, (2) the sample size was deemed too small, or (3) too few marker systems were typed. A complete listing of the population samples retained for analysis as well as those deleted (and the reasons for deletion) can be found in Suarez et al (1985).…”

“…This index of average heterozygosity, then, measures a population's heterozygosity relative to that of all other populations in the sample. Admixture In order to assess the degree to which inclusion of samples with significant European admixture might influence the alleged relationship between sociocultural complexity and average heterozygosity, 19 highly admixed samples were removed from the data base (see Suarez et al, 1985, for a list of these populations). Briefly, societies having a frequency of the European RH haplotype cde (r) exceeding 5% were deleted.…”