Interviewee: Douglas Wallace. Mitochondrial DNA pioneer Douglas Wallace talks about the migrations of people from Asia into the Americas. (DNAi Location: Applications > Human origins > Migrations > Videos > From Siberia to the Arctic and the Americas)

By the time you get to Chukotka [a peninsula in the extreme northeast of Siberia], you only have haplogroups A, C, and D [human lineages found in Asia]. They then are the only ones that were available when the Bering landbridge became exposed to cross over into the Americas. And therefore the first migration into the Americas brought haplogroups A, C, and D, and gave rise to the first Native Americans, the so-called Paleo-Indians. Then later, another migration occurred. So that first one was about 20,000 to 30,000 years ago. Another migration occurred, bringing only a modified A, also from Chukotka, and that gave rise to a population in this region of North America that pushed the Paleo-Indians southward, and those are the Na-Dene-speaking people: the Apache, the Navajo, the Athabaskans, the Dogribs etc. And then finally, there was an expansion of people bringing altered A and D along the extreme Arctic all the way to Greenland, and those are the Eskimos. Also out of this area of Asia, about 20,000 years ago, a lineage developed which we call B. And B then moved up along the coast, and then bypassed the extreme Arctic, moved down along the coast and then moved inward into the Americas. So now Native Americans have A, B, C, and D.

paleo indians,douglas wallace,athabaskans,haplogroups,human origins,landbridge,land bridge,extreme northeast,location applications,dnai,interviewee,eskimos,dene,migrations,lineages,navajo,lineage,chukotka,siberia,native american