Ancient Genomics of the Peopling of the Americas

Summary

This is an abstract from the "2025 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of David J. Meltzer Part II" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Americas were the last continent to be reached by anatomically modern humans. Thanks to large-scale genomic studies, archaeology, anthropology and geology we have a broad understanding of the process whereby the ancestors of present-day Indigenous Americans originated in Northeast Asia, reached the continent after the Last Glacial Maximum (<25,000, years ago) and rapidly expanded as the Glacial ice sheets melted towards the end of the Pleistocene. However, owing to the low archaeological visibility of the first American populations, multiple features of the peopling of the Americas remain contentious.

In this talk, I will present our work focused on studying whole genomes from individuals spanning from Alaska to Patagonia and dating from the Terminal Pleistocene to the Late Holocene. By analysing these genomes and contextualising them together with archaeological evidence, we have obtained valuable insights into the timing and location of the formation of the Indigenous American gene pool and the populations that contributed to it, the ancient population divergence and admixture patterns within the Americas and their role in shaping the genomic diversity of present-day Indigenous Americans.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• 2025 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of David J. Meltzer Part II   •
• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51347