Ancient DNA confirms Native Americans’ deep roots in North and South America

[D J Thornton]

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/11 ... th-america

For decades, scientists could describe the peopling of the Americas only in broad strokes, leaving plenty of mysteries about when and how people spread across the continents. Now, state-of-the-art ancient DNA methods, applied to scores of new samples from around the Americas, are filling in the picture. Two independent studies, published in Cell and online in Science, find that ancient populations expanded rapidly across the Americas about 13,000 years ago. They also emphasize that the story continued in the thousands of years since, revealing previously undocumented, large-scale movements between North and South America.

[Raven]

On FamilyTreeDNA I have a small amount of Oceania but no Native American. On Gedmatch I have Oceania/Polynesia/Melanesia on every calculator I run my DNA through. On DNA Consultants my top NA Match is Brazilian-Belem Amazonians. I also got a match to Cherokee and native Americans from Florida. FamilyTreeDNA picked up East Africa and African was present on Gedmatch too. A genealogist told me it’s possible I have Malagasy ancestry but maybe the African and “Oceania” results are really American Indian showing up but the other tests cannot identify where my DNA comes like the more detailed tests I took with DNA Consultants? I thought I read that the Cherokee can have Polynesian ancestry.

[dpyates]

Ravenspirit,

You are certainly right about the shifting "peopling of the Americas" and South America becoming much more complex and prominent. The jury is still out whether there was an early Austronesian/Australian wave but that seems likely. In both N and S America there was a lot more mixing, population replacement, genetic drift and ghost populations (people who died out in the places where they once lived and are not represented there today except submerged in the genetic record). Ancient DNA teaches us the same lessons.

Also wanted to point out for those who are puzzled by South American results, it is becoming clear that Southeastern Indians included Mayans, Panoans, Caribs, Arawaks and other peoples from the South. The Tihanama claimed they came from South America and went to the American Southwest first, finding it tropical rather than desert. In the Colonial Period there were roaming bands of Caribs (cannibals) all across the Southern States until they settled down and made peace with the Apalache Kingdom, partly adopting their religion, which was sun worship. They later backslid and went rogue again. The Itsate Creek spoke a language like the Maya who built Chichen Itza. Richard Thornton has shown how the Apalache left stone temples, plazas etc. in the mountains of North Georgia, which was their stronghold until 1715, when, as a consequence of the Yamasee War, they were defeated and went south. Hitchiti (Itsate Creek) and Mikkosuki became two of the languages of the Seminoles. Those of you who get Florida Native American matches could well have Apalache ancestry.

Apalache ancestry was much more common than Cherokee. The latter were a relatively small mixed band of Indians related to the Stony Tribes who lived with the Mohawks or Haudenosaunee west of the Mississippi, then in the Ohio Valley. The two fought for the last time around 600 CE and as terms of peace the Cherokee (Eshelokee, a Greek name) gave up their non-Indian language and adopted Mohawk. They spoke it like a second language and retained a lot of Greek words. That's why Mohawk and Cherokee are mutually unintelligible and do not have a lot of vocabulary that is cognate. Cherokee is not really a branch of Mohawk but mixed with it. Most of the Indian languages are highly mixed, which is why they cannot be arranged in clear families. The Lenape then came in from the West and fought the united Indians, now lumped together as Talegans. After the Bloody Battle of the Falls of Kentucky, the Shawnee became supreme and one defeated element went to the Finger Lakes District of New York, the other gradually ended up in the Smoky Mountains. Since this move split a lot of families, the Ohio Valley homeland was called the Land of Sorrow.

So the Cherokee language is not an earlier form of Mohawk but a later pidgin version of it. The people did not call themselves Cherokee or Tsalagi or Choloki until the Europeans came along and gave them that name. They did not occupy the Smoky Mountains or Northwest Tennessee until about 1500, driven westward by the incoming Muscogee, who reached Virginia about the same time and turned south. They did not occupy North Georgia until around 1800, after their towns in the Appalachians had been destroyed three times over by the whites. A fiction was created by the English that the Cherokees won North Georgia from the Creeks in warfare.

The word Cherokee and its variants first appears on maps of the region only around 1700. They were an obscure band of mostly brigands, slavers and horse thieves until they became the English officials' "pet Indians."

The archeologists have not been able to find any sites to excavate that can be considered Cherokee or proto-Cherokee.

The textbooks claim the Cherokee have been in place in the Southern Highlands for 10,000 years and ceded 5 million acres of tribal land to the whites in Tenn., Ky., Va., W. Va., Ga. (ha ha), Ala., S.C. and N.C. Cherokee history has been deconstructed wholesale by Richard Thornton at People of One Fire (unfortunate acronym POOF), https://peopleofonefire.com/author/richard.

It is much involved, but the bottom line is that your match to "Cherokee" and family recollections about being "Cherokee" could refer to Apalache and other Indians. None of the Cherokee towns, from Tahlequah to Citico, began as place-names in the Cherokee language, they were mostly in proto-Creek languages like Itsate (Hitchiti).

According to Rafinesque, the Apalache Empire was fully as advanced as the civilizations of Teotihuacan, the Mayas and Incas. They originated as the offshoot of Mediterranean and Southern European peoples (Atalans). They did not come from Asia.

[christopherswink8]

I find this study very interesting seeing how Austrailian /Austronesian is one of my Megapopulations matches. Thank you for posting.