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Throughout our history as a species, Homo sapiens We have managed to reach the most remote corners on Earth. Millennia before the era of exploration, our ancestors undertook a trip that took them out of Africa and populate the great continental masses from Europe to South America. Among all these great migrations, one of the most surprising was the one that led humans from Siberia to Patagonia, a 10,000 trip whose details are knowing.
History in genes. A new genetic study has given us new clues on the great migration that resulted in the population of the Americas. A migration of 20,000 kilometers whose implications still last in aspects as apparently distant as health.
The study allowed to draw the history of migrations until the considered “final border” of human migrations, Tierra del Fuego, Explain the team responsible for the study.
History of a millennia trip. This great migration would have begun in Siberia between 27,000 and 19,000 years ago Approximately during the last glaciation, in what we know today as the Bering Strait would have formed a “bridge” of land due to a lower sea level than the present.
Through Alaska, these populations would have arrived in North America, but the expansion through this continent would have been only an intermediate stage. The study focuses on the second part of the trip, when part of the new American population crossed the Central American Isthmus to enter the last continent in being populated.
The last border. The new genetic analysis allows us to know how humans expanded in South America. The responsible team detected that lineages In this continent they began to diverge with each other between 14,000 and 10,000 years ago.
From this point, the South American population began to separate into four groups. The first to disintegrate was those who populated the Amazon basin, while the rest was distributed among the high areas of the Andes mountain range, the desert area of the Chaco, and finally, Patagonia.
Reading migration in genes. For its study, the team sequenced the genomes of 1,537 individuals belonging to 139 villages of the continent. The details of the study were published In an article In the magazine Science.
Very long -term implications. The consequences of this migratory movement and its vicissitudes still last and some of them still weigh on the native peoples of South America, especially as a consequence of the isolation of some of these populations with respect to the rest of humanity. This could explain why some populations were more susceptible to the introduction of infectious diseases by the first Europeans to reach the continent.
“Those migrants carried only a subset of the genetic heritage in their ancestral populations (…). Thus, reduced genetic diversity also caused a reduced diversity in immunity -related genes, which can limit flexibility when fighting several infectious diseases,” stood out in a press release Kim Hie Lim, Co -author of the study.
From the past to the present. Knowing new data on the genetics of American peoples can also help us in the present. This information is valuable when studying treatments of genetic diseases, or to better understand the functioning and impact of certain medications. In addition, the closest relationship between American and Asian populations implies new data on a population that, recalls the team responsible for the new work, covers 50% of the world’s population.
Image | Soyyosycocomiel / Martin St-Amant
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