Raghavan, Maanasa, DeGiorgio, Michael, Albrechtsen, Anders, Moltke, Ida, Skoglund, Pontus, Korneliussen, Thorfinn S., Grønnow, Bjarne, Appelt, Martin, Gulløv, Hans Christian, Friesen, T. M., Fitzhugh, William W., Malmström, Helena, Rasmussen, Simon, Olsen, Jesper, Melchior, Linea, Fuller, Benjamin T., Fahrni, Simon M., Stafford, Thomas, Grimes, Vaughan, Renouf, M. A. P., Cybulski, Jerome, Lynnerup, Niels, Lahr, Marta Mirazon, Britton, Kate, Knecht, Rick et al. 2014. "The genetic prehistory of the New World Arctic." Science, 345, (6200) 1020. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1255832.
The New World Arctic, the last region of the Americas to be populated by humans, has a relatively well-researched archaeology, but an understanding of its genetic history is lacking. We present genome-wide sequence data from ancient and present-day humans from Greenland, Arctic Canada, Alaska, Aleutian Islands, and Siberia. We show that Paleo-Eskimos (~3000 BCE to 1300 CE) represent a migration pulse into the Americas independent of both Native American and Inuit expansions. Furthermore, the genetic continuity characterizing the Paleo-Eskimo period was interrupted by the arrival of a new population, representing the ancestors of present-day Inuit, with evidence of past gene flow between these lineages. Despite periodic abandonment of major Arctic regions, a single Paleo-Eskimo metapopulation likely survived in near-isolation for more than 4000 years, only to vanish around 700 years ago.
