A significant discovery of the genetic analysis of the 24,000 year old remains of the Malta boy was the presence of Haplogroup U (Ursula). The authors of this discovery made an inference that this connects Native Americans with Europeans and not with East Asians.
But what about South Asians?
The Wikipedia article and the quoted links in that article say that U is present in South Asia also, in addition to West Europe / West Eurasia. In Europe it is found specifically in West Britain and Scandinavia ( here), but its presence is only 11% in Europe which is less than that is found in India. In India, haplogroup U is found in 23% of the population (15% in Indian castes and 8% in tribals ) Refer Karmin, Monika (2005). Human mitochondrial DNA haplogroup R in India. University of Tartu.
I think the researchers must not ignore the Indian connection.
How to connect the Malta boy's U lineage to India ?
The remains of this boy were found near Lake Baikal in Siberia. This formed part of Uttara Kuru which was earlier the location of Devas and was kept out of reach for anyone outside this region by the inhabitants there. From epic and puranic accounts, we know that this region was closed for outsiders.
From a description in Mahabharata on Arjuna's trip to Uttar Kuru, it is known that from Sthree-rajya, he went to Uttarkuru. Shtree rajya is currently known as Straya Maina (in Samara) where a Vishnu idol had been found out. Lalithadhitya Mukthapeeda, the king of Kashmir (AD 724 to 760) established a temple for Narahari in Sthree Rajya. Read my article here.
The location of Sthree-rajya (Samara) is shown in the picture below. Lake Baikal, written as Vaikhanas and rounded in the picture is the location where the 24,000 year old remains have been found.
From Sthreerajya, Arjuna went to Uttar Kuru / Siberia.
The name Siberia came from "Sibi" the plant (Typha angustifolia) that was completely edible and was grown in that part – read here for the name-cause of Siberia.
Sibi was also the name of a popular ruler coming in the branch of Rama's Ikshvaku clan and his descendants spread to Tamilnadu ( as Cholans) and Northwest India / Afghanistan / Middle east. His name as Sibi, seems to have some matrilineal connections with Sibi growing areas of Siberia. Read here to know the connection between Siberia and South Asia. Sibi's paternal link comes from early Ikshvakus.
Till Mandhatha, Sibi's lineage was same as Rama's. Why the lineage diverged after that was because in Rama's lineage (as given in Valmiki Ramayana) only the eldest son in the family came to the throne. The siblings were free to set up their own kingdoms. Sibi came in such a line of siblings. Sibi's name appears in the genealogy of Tamil Cholan's as found in the copper plate inscriptions of Thireuvalangadu. As per that, the lineage is same as Rama's upto Mandhatha.
The Buddhist Scholar Buddhaghosa has recorded that Mandhatha went around the four Mahadipas and brought a large number of people of Uttarakuru to India. This migration happened sometime after the first floods at the end of Ice age.
But even before that period, a branch of Kurus had already left for the Northern regions such as Siberia. From Mahabharata sources it is known that the Kuru ( a clan) were already there in Uttara Kuru (Northern Kuru) and the Kurus of Mahabharatha period (Pandavas and Kauravas) were the southern branch of them. This tallies with genetic studies on a previous wave of migration about 40,000 years ago. It is possible that some of the earlier haplogroup U that moved through Arabian Sea corridor had settled in India and others had gone to far-off Northern latitudes. Those who stayed back were Dakshina Kuru and those who went to Siberia were Uttara kuru. It is also possible that the previous group of haplogroup U that still stayed on in the south Indian Ocean habitat after out of Africa, moved to India after the first flood at the end of Ice age. Mandhata was a descendant of this group. Thus we find the same branch of people (haplogroup U) settled in Uttarakuru (Siberia) and India (Dakshina Kuru) and shuttling between these places.
In Valmiki Ramayana, in chapter 4-43, from 31st verse onwards the description starts on the regions north of Himalayas. It starts with a Lake belonging to Vaikhanasa sages. This must be Lake Baikal. Usually Vedic sages settle down in strategic locations suitable for meditation and for drawing the Supreme Energy. Lake Baikal is in the NE- SW direction falling in line with two important Himalayan abodes of Vishnu and Shiva namely Badrinath and Rishikesh.
In this picture A is Rishikesh, B is Badrinath and C is lake Baikal.
If we stretch this alignment further, it reaches to Somnath, the first Jyothirlinga kshetra, known as Prabhasa in Mahabharata times.
The connection between India and Baikal where Vaikhasana sages did penance make it possible that frequent shuttling happened between India and Baikal / Siberia.
One of the important features found along with 24,000 year old remains of the Malta boy is the presence of Venus figurines.
Burial of Mal'ta child redrawn from Gerasimov (1935), with photos of the plaque
and swan from the burial and a representative Venus figurine from
the excavation [Credit: Kelly E Graf]
Presence of Venus figurines about 24,000 years ago shows a strong faith in female or matrilineal aspects.
One of the main features of people of Uttarakuru is that the women enjoyed freedom from all taboos of a society. They were free to mate with anyone they liked and that they had many mates. Yudhishtira justified the marriage of Draupadi with 5 brothers only by citing this practice at Utatra kuru. The importance and glorification of female power perhaps has a connection to the prevalence of Venus figurines as early as that time. Some of the figurines also show a resemblance to Jyeshta Devi, the first born of the churning of the Milky Ocean. Though she is symbolic of dirt that frosted when the ocean was churned, worship of her was intended to ward off inauspiciousness.
Jyeshta Devi, Kailasanatha temple, Kancheepuram, Tamilnadu.
Venus of Willendorf dated at 24,000 to 22,000 BCE .
Sthree-rajya in Samara was also known for pre-dominance of women having free life. The spread of these women in west Eurasia and Scandinavia is thus an easy probability. What is ignored is the existence of the same U group in India which is backed by many literary sources, an outline of which was written above.
- Jayasree
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From
24,000-Year-Old Body Shows Kinship to Europeans and American Indians
By
Published: November 20, 2013
The genome of a young boy buried at Mal'ta near Lake Baikal in eastern Siberia some 24,000 years ago has turned out to hold two surprises for anthropologists.
A cross-section of the Mal'ta boy's upper arm bone.
The first is that the boy's DNA matches that of Western Europeans, showing that during the last Ice Age people from Europe had reached farther east across Eurasia than previously supposed. Though none of the Mal'ta boy's skin or hair survives, his genes suggest he would have had brown hair, brown eyes and freckled skin.
The second surprise is that his DNA also matches a large proportion — about 25 percent — of the DNA of living Native Americans. The first people to arrive in the Americas have long been assumed to have descended from Siberian populations related to East Asians. It now seems that they may be a mixture between the Western Europeans who had reached Siberia and an East Asian population.
The Mal'ta boy was 3 to 4 years old and was buried under a stone slab wearing an ivory diadem, a bead necklace and a bird-shaped pendant. Elsewhere at the same site about 30 Venus figurines were found of the kind produced by the Upper Paleolithic cultures of Europe. The remains were excavated by Russian archaeologists over a 20-year period ending in 1958 and stored in museums in St. Petersburg.
There they lay for some 50 years until they were examined by a team led by Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen. Dr. Willerslev, an expert in analyzing ancient DNA, was seeking to understand the peopling of the Americas by searching for possible source populations in Siberia. He extracted DNA from bone taken from the child's upper arm, hoping to find ancestry in the East Asian peoples from whom Native Americans are known to be descended.
But the first results were disappointing. The boy's mitochondrial DNA belonged to the lineage known as U, which is commonly found among the modern humans who first entered Europe about 44,000 years ago. The lineages found among Native Americans are those designated A, B, C, D and X, so the U lineage pointed to contamination of the bone by the archaeologists or museum curators who had handled it, a common problem with ancient DNA projects. "The study was put on low speed for about a year because I thought it was all contamination," Dr. Willerslev said.
His team proceeded anyway to analyze the nuclear genome, which contains the major part of human inheritance. They were amazed when the nuclear genome also turned out to have partly European ancestry. Examining the genome from a second Siberian grave site, that of an adult who died 17,000 years ago, they found the same markers of European origin. Together, the two genomes indicate that descendants of the modern humans who entered Europe had spread much farther east across Eurasia than had previously been assumed and occupied Siberia during an extremely cold period starting 20,000 years ago that is known as the Last Glacial Maximum.
The other surprise from the Mal'ta boy's genome was that it matched to both Europeans and Native Americans but not to East Asians. Dr. Willerslev's interpretation was that the ancestors of Native Americans had already separated from the East Asian population when they interbred with the people of the Mal'ta culture, and that this admixed population then crossed over the Beringian land bridge that then lay between Siberia and Alaska to become a founding population of Native Americans.
"We estimate that 14 to 38 percent of Native American ancestry may originate through gene flow from this ancient population," he and colleagues wrote in an article published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
A European contribution to Native American ancestry could explain two longstanding puzzles about the people's origins. One is that many ancient Native American skulls, including that of the well-known Kennewick man, look very different from those of the present day population. Another is that one of the five mitochondrial DNA lineages found in Native Americans, the lineage known as X, also occurs in Europeans. One explanation is that Europeans managed to cross the Atlantic in small boats some 20,000 years ago and joined the Native Americans from Siberia.
He said his finding does not solve the much-disputed question of when the Americas were first settled. Archaeologists long believed the people of the Clovis culture, dated from 13,000 years ago, were the first Americans, but several recent finds point to an earlier date. "We need the sequencing of more ancient genomes to address this question," Dr. Willerslev said.
The Mal'ta people built houses that were partly underground, with bone walls and roofs made of reindeer antlers. Their culture is distinguished by its many art objects and its survival in an unforgiving climate.
Dr. Willerslev presented his team's findings last month at a conference in Santa Fe on Native American origins. "There was a lot of surprise and some skepticism, as is often the case in science toward new findings," said Dennis H. O'Rourke, an anthropologist at the University of Utah who works on ancient DNA and the North American Arctic.
Dr. O'Rourke said the result would prompt a search for more ancient DNA from Siberia in order to provide a better context for Dr. Willerslev's reconstruction of early American origins. "I think it's a very important and really interesting result, but it is from a single individual," he said.
Theodore G. Schurr, an anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania, said Dr. Willerslev had provided an interesting new perspective on Native American origins that helped explain the presence of the mitochondrial X lineage in North America and enlarged the understanding of population history in Siberia. But the time and place of the East-West population mixing adduced by Dr. Willerslev is not yet clear, he said.
An unexplained feature of the mixing is that the Mal'ta people did not pass on their mitochondrial DNA since the U lineage is unknown among Native Americans. Since mitochondrial DNA is passed down only through the female line, the population ancestral to Native Americans could have been formed by men of the Mal'ta culture who acquired East Asian wives.
Dr. Willerslev sees this as one possibility, another being that mitochondrial DNA lineages are easily lost through genetic drift, the random change in DNA patterns through the generations. "One has to be careful setting up detailed geographical scenarios at this stage," Dr. Willerslev said.
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From
24,000-year-old skeletal remains raise new questions about first Americans
Posted by TANN Ancient, Anthropology, ArchaeoHeritage, Archaeology, Breakingnews, Forensics, Genetics, North America, Siberia 4:00 PM
Results from a DNA study of a young boy's skeletal remains believed to be 24,000 years old could turn the archaeological world upside down – it's been proven that nearly 30 percent of modern Native American's ancestry came from this youngster's gene pool, suggesting First Americans came directly from Siberia, according to a research team that includes a Texas A&M University professor.
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| These are the remains of the 24,000-year-old Mal'ta boy |
Kelly Graf, assistant professor in the Center for the Study of First Americans and Department of Anthropology at Texas A&M, is part of an international team spearheaded by Eske Willerslev and Maanasa Raghaven from the Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark and additional researchers from Sweden, Russia, United Kingdom, University of Chicago and University of California-Berkeley. Their work, funded by the Danish National Science Foundation, Lundbeck Foundation, and the National Science Foundation, is published in the current issue of Nature magazine.
Graf and Willerslev conceived the project and traveled to the Hermitage State Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, where the remains are now housed to collect samples for ancient DNA. The skeleton was first discovered in the late 1920s near the village of Mal'ta in south-central Siberia, and since then it has been referred to as "the Mal'ta child" because until this DNA study the biological sex of the skeleton was unknown.
"Now we can say with confidence that this individual was a male" says Graf.
Graf helped extract DNA material from the boy's upper arm and "the results surprised all of us quite a bit," she explains.
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| Burial of Mal'ta child redrawn from Gerasimov (1935), with photos of the plaque
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"It shows he had close genetic ties to today's Native Americans and some western Eurasians, specifically some groups living in central Asia, South Asia, and Europe. Also, he shared close genetic ties with other Ice-Age western Eurasians living in European Russia, Czech Republic and even Germany. We think these Ice-Age people were quite mobile and capable of maintaining a far-reaching gene pool that extended from central Siberia all the way west to central Europe."
Another significant result of the study is that the Mal'ta boy's people were also ancestors of Native Americans, explaining why some early Native American skeletons such as Kennewick Man were interpreted to have some European traits.
"Our study proves that Native Americans ancestors migrated to the Americas from Siberia and not directly from Europe as some have recently suggested," Graf explains.
The DNA work performed on the boy is the oldest complete genome of a human sequenced so far, the study shows. Also found near the boy's remains were flint tools, a beaded necklace and what appears to be pendant-like items, all apparently placed in the burial as grave goods.
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| Cross section through the Mal'ta humerus. The central void is the |
The discovery raises new questions about the timing of human entry in Alaska and ultimately North America, a topic hotly debated in First Americans studies.
"Though our results cannot speak directly to this debate, they do indicate Native American ancestors could have been in Beringia—extreme northeastern Russia and Alaska—any time after 24,000 years ago and therefore could have colonized Alaska and the Americas much earlier than 14,500 years ago, the age suggested by the archaeological record."
"What we need to do is continue searching for earlier sites and additional clues to piece together this very big puzzle."
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