197W Poster - Population Genetics
Wednesday June 08, 9:15 PM - 10:00 PM

Authors:
Andre Luiz Campelo dos Santos ^1,2; Amanda Owings ³; Henry Socrates Lavalle Sullasi ²; Omer Gokcumen ⁴; Michael DeGiorgio ¹; John Lindo ³

Affiliations:
1) Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL; 2) Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Recife, Brazil; 3) Emory University, Atlanta, GA; 4) State University of New York at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY

Keywords:
Ancient DNA

An increasing body of archaeological and genomic evidence have indicated a complex settlement process of the Americas. Starting from Beringia some 20,000 years before present, ancestral Native Americans (NAs) explored and settled northern North America, where they later diverged into two basal genomic branches: Northern NA (NNA) and Southern NA (SNA). The SNA rapidly dispersed towards South America through the Pacific coast, giving rise to present-day Central and South NAs. During this process, an unsampled population also introduced an Australasian ancestry that can only be found in NAs from western Amazonia and in one archaeological individual from Lagoa Santa (Southeastern Brazil). The easternmost portion of South America, however, remains largely unexplored by archaeogenomic studies. Here we show that newly sequenced archaeological individuals from Northeastern Brazil and Uruguay share strong genomic relationships with Lagoa Santa and ancient Panama. We also found that the Australasian signal and an unexpected high genomic affinity with present-day Onge are representative in ancient individuals along South America’s Atlantic coast. Our results provide genomic evidence for ancient migrations along South America’s Atlantic coast. Our work unravels the deep demographic history of eastern South America, and it should be a starting point for further fine-scale investigations in the region.