95% of Native Americans traced to six women

[edward]

I found this to be interesting:

NEW YORK (AP) -- Nearly all of today's Native Americans in North, Central and South America can trace part of their ancestry to six women who lived around 20,000 years ago, a DNA study suggests.

Those women left a particular DNA legacy that persists today in about about 95 percent of Native Americans, researchers said.

The finding does not mean that only these six women gave rise to the migrants who crossed into North America from Asia in the initial populating of the continent, said study co-author Ugo Perego.

The women lived between 18,000 and 21,000 years ago, though not necessarily at exactly the same time, he said.

And this to be a bit of a surprise:

The six "founding mothers" apparently did not live in Asia because the DNA signatures they left behind aren't found there, Perego said. They probably lived in Beringia, the now-submerged land bridge that stretched to North America, he said.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/03/13/native.dna.ap/index.html

 

[Lanka]

You might find it interesting to hear of another such theory. There is a prevalent theory even now that states that one person is connected to everyone else in the world through a chain of six links. That means that every person in the world can be connected to you through six people that you have come in contact with. For instance, your mother can connect you to a large family as well as all the people she went to high school with and college and anyone who has been near her when she went shopping and those people who have been near her and the people at her office. That is one person who connects to tons of others. Another person can be the waitress at the restaurant you visited a year ago. She could have been born in India...well, I think you might be seeing the picture. This theory is called Six Degrees of Separation.

 

[BoomBoom]

This theory is called Six Degrees of Separation.

...to Kevin Bacon! :P

 

[mgb_phys]

The six "founding mothers" apparently did not live in Asia because the DNA signatures they left behind aren't found there, Perego said. They probably lived in Beringia, the now-submerged land bridge that stretched to North America, he said.

That's exactly what you would expect. A large diverse population in Asia, a small subset migrates, a significant proportion die - or at lelast don't have any female children (presumably the study was done with mDNA) and all the descendants are from the 6 whose female children survived.
Remember these 6 weren't necessarily together, there could have been many different tribes that crossed but only 6 ended up having at least some female children who have always had at least some female children ever since.