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Phoenix666 writes:

The exact process by which humanity introduced itself to the Americas has always been controversial. While there's general agreement on the most important migration—across the Bering land bridge at the end of the last ice age—there's a lot of arguing over the details. Now, two new papers clarify some of the bigger picture but also introduce a new wrinkle: there's DNA from the distant Pacific floating around in the genomes of Native Americans. And the two groups disagree about how it got there.
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The Athabascans and Aleutian islanders also have a rather unexpected contribution from Australo-Melanesians, the natives of Australia, New Guinea, and the Andaman Islands. That, this study found, was absent in populations farther south.

Not so, says the study that focused on South American groups. Here, a strong signal from Australo-Melanesians was present in a number of Amazonian tribes; weaker affinities are scattered through South and Central America. At the same time, there are other groups in this region with no affinity to Australo-Melanesians.

It will be interesting to see if migration paths can be reconstructed as DNA from more locations in the Pacific can be sequenced.

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