Re: Rewriting Greenland's immigration history


"Jack Linthicum" <jacklinthicum@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> skrev i meddelandet
news:1373e56a-6024-4387-9ab1-9231025d98d8@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
? = '
DNA traces the Greenland maternal DNA to Siberia.

Public release date: 29-May-2008


Contact: Eske Willerslev
ewillerslev@xxxxxxxxx

University of Copenhagen
Rewriting Greenland's immigration history

Thirty-six-year-old Professor Eske Willerslev, University of
Copenhagen, and his team of fossil DNA researchers have done it a
couple of times before: rewritten world history. Most recently two
months ago when he and his team discovered that the ancestors of the
North American Indians were the first people to populate America, and
that they came to the country more than 1,000 years earlier than
originally assumed. And the evidence is, so to speak, quite tangible:
DNA samples of fossilised human faeces found in deep caves in southern
Oregon.

This time, focus is on Greenland, and the scientific evidence is DNA
analyses of hair from the Disco Bay ice fjord area in north-west
Greenland, which are well-preserved after 4,000 years in permafrost
soil. The team?s discovery makes it necessary to review Greenland?s
immigration history. Until now, science regarded it as a possibility
that the earliest people in Greenland were direct ancestors of the
present-day Greenlandic population.

It now turns out that the original immigrants on the maternal side,
which is reflected in the mitochondrial DNA, instead came from a
Siberian population whose closest present-day descendants come from
the Aleutian Islands on the boundary between the Northern Pacific
Ocean and the Bering Sea and the Seriniki Yuit in north-east Siberia.
Discovered in more recent times by the Dane Vitus Bering in 1741, the
Aleutian Islands today include some 300 islands spanning 1,900 km from
Alaska in the USA to the Kamchatka peninsula in Russia.

?They must have crossed the ice from the Aleutian Islands via Alaska
and Canada and then on to Greenland. We have always known that the
first immigrants came to Greenland approx. 4,500 years ago, because
tools from that time have been found. But what we did not know was
that they probably came via the Aleutian Islands, which our DNA
research now shows. The project was actually close to being shelved.
Originally, I was in the most northern part of Greenland with Claus
Andreasen from the National Museum of Greenland, Nuuk, looking for DNA
traces. It was a total failure. But in another context, I found out
that archaeologist Bjarne Gr?nnow from the National Museum of Denmark,
Copenhagen, had made some excavations at the Qeqertasussuk settlement
in the northern part of West Greenland in the 1980s. And then, among
all the samples taken from the frozen culture layers on the site, I
suddenly found a tuft of hair which I analysed together with my
colleague Tom Gilbert,? says Eske Willerslev.

?The forgotten Greenlandic hair? from the samples was subsequently
analysed for so-called mitochondria. They are the genes on the
maternal side, a kind of cellular power plant, and they are well-
suited for comparative DNA studies of mammals, including humans. The
Willerslev team then checked the results of the analysis of the
Greenlandic hair against an international DNA database and the
database came up with the eastern part of Siberia and the Aleutian
Islands, which is populated by a group that has peopled other places
in the Arctic area.

Another interesting finding is that there is no connection between
this DNA mass and the most recent immigration to Greenland, the Thule
culture, the ancestors of modern Greenlandic Inuit.

?Our findings prove that humans moved to other places far earlier than
what is normally assumed today. We may only have studied the
mitochondria ? the female part, but it is the first time ever that
someone has succeeded in sequencing the entire mitochondrial genome
from an extinct human. Our next project will be to raise funds for
recreating what is technically known as the core genome from the tuft
of hair, in other words the first full picture of the genetic material
of an extinct human. Today, this is technically possible, and it may
tell us where the paternal line came from in the earliest immigration
to Greenland, and, for example, the eye colour of these early people.
The paternal line may very well come from a totally different place,?
says Eske Willerslev, who will shortly publish his autobiographical
book ?Fra pelsj?ger til professor ? en personlig rejse gennem
fortidens dna-mysterier? (From fur hunter to professor ? a personal
journey through the DNA mysteries of the past).

Jack, and others,
this is interesting in more ways than one. Actually I have plans contacting
one of my former teachers at Linköping's university, who happened to have or
at least put forward this hypotes over the ice via Alaska to Greenland back
in early 1990's. It's seemed than a possible timetable but not so probable,
thanks for the info.

Inger E


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