Interviewee: Steve Olson. Author Steve Olson speaks about the genetic variation of North American residents. (DNAi Location: Applications > Human Origins > Variation > Interviews > America: the melting pot)

North America is a very interesting part of the world because it's brought together people from, really the corners of the Old World if you think about it, the primary groups that were represented in the, in the Americas were first of all the Native Americans who had come from Asia and spread up and down the length of North and South America say, 10,000 to 15,000 years ago. You then had a group of eastern and northern Europeans, you had western Africans who came largely through the slave trade, and at the same time you have had Asians who have come across the Pacific Ocean, and so what you had was a mixing of just about the most different groups of people that you possibly could find in the world. Now it's, everywhere in the world where that happens, you tend to see groups of people start mixing their genomes together. That's been the case throughout the Old World as well, and so in many respects America is no different than the pattern that we've seen elsewhere, which is that people have a strong tendency to mix their genomes when they're together in a particular location. But in America you had groups from so many different and widely separated places, that this mixing of people I think is even more obvious, more apparent.

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