Bridging the Americas and Eurasia: Population History of American Arctic Peoples
Tez Türü: Doktora
Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Ostrava Üniversitesi, Doğa Bilimleri Fakültesi, Biyoloji ve Ekoloji Bölümü, Çek Cumhuriyeti
Tez Danışmanı: Pavel Flegontov,Stephan Schiffels
Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2019
Tezin Dili: İngilizce
Özet:
Archaeogenetics, the study of ancient DNA, is often combined with anthropology, archeology, history, and linguistics for wide-ranging studies of human population history. The work conducted throughout my PhD and described in this thesis focuses on population history of two regions: i) the American Arctic, ii) Neolithic period of Anatolia. Humans spread into the Americas, the last continent to be colonized by humans, between the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) and 12,000 years ago and genetic ancestry of almost all Southern and some Northern Native Americans can be traced back to this first dispersal. This initial migration was followed by two additional massive migration waves from Eurasia to North America via Bering Strait. The second wave is the Paleo-Eskimo migration, which occurred around 5,000 years ago. Paleo-Eskimos expanded through vast regions of North America from Alaska to Greenland, and controlled this region over 4,000 years. Later, different cultures from Chukotka replaced them and gave rise to present-day Eskimo-Aleut-speakers. In the first part of the thesis, we modelled the genetic history of indigenous populations speaking Na-Dene, Eskimo-Aleut and Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages. Dene-Yeniseian macro-family hypothesis suggests that Na-Dene-speakers have a linguistic connection with Yeniseian language family from Central Siberia. We investigated a possible genetic affinity between these language families by modelling this complex history comprehensively with numerous computational methods based on haplotype structure (ChromoPainter and GlobeTrotter), rare allele frequency spectrum (Rarecoal) and allele frequency correlations (qpAdm, qpGraph). Our models showed that Paleo-Eskimo-related ancestry was omnipresent among Na-Dene and Eskimo-Aleut speakers, and Paleo-Eskimos could have been vehicles to transfer Yeniseian languages from Siberia to North America. The second part of the thesis focused on the Neolithic transition in the Anatolian Peninsula and the migration of farmers into Europe. A sedentary farming lifestyle is known to have started in the Fertile Crescent around 10,000 years ago and subsequently this culture spread to Europe through Anatolia. Here, we present the first autosomal genetic data from Çatalhöyük, an excavation site located at the central Anatolia and represents one of the earliest farming societies in Anatolia. We explored if the spread of farming idea was only a cultural diffusion or also contributed to the gene pool.