Publication Date
3-29-2022
Document Type
Article
Publication Title
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Volume
119
Issue
13
DOI
10.1073/pnas.2111533119
Abstract
Traditional knowledge, along with archaeological and linguistic evidence, documents that California supports cultural and linguistically diverse Indigenous populations. Studies that have included ancient genomes in this region, however, have focused primarily on broad-scale migration history of the North American continent, with relatively little attention to local population dynamics. Here, in a partnership involving researchers and the Muwekma Ohlone tribe, we analyze genomic data from ancient and present-day individuals from the San Francisco Bay Area in California: 12 ancient individuals dated to 1905 to 1826 and 601 to 184 calibrated years before the present (cal BP) from two archaeological sites and eight present-day members of the Muwekma Ohlone tribe, whose ancestral lands include these two sites. We find that when compared to other ancient and modern individuals throughout the Americas, the 12 ancient individuals from the San Francisco Bay Area cluster with ancient individuals from Southern California. At a finer scale of analysis, we find that the 12 ancient individuals from the San Francisco Bay Area have distinct ancestry from the other groups and that this ancestry has a component of continuity over time with the eight present-day Muwekma Ohlone individuals. These results add to our understanding of Indigenous population history in the San Francisco Bay Area, in California, and in western North America more broadly.
Funding Number
BCS-1518026
Funding Sponsor
National Science Foundation
Keywords
genes and languages, identity by descent, Indigenous population genetics, paleogenomics, Penutian hypothesis
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Department
Sociology and Interdisciplinary Social Sciences
Recommended Citation
Alissa L. Severson, Brian F. Byrd, Elizabeth K. Mallott, Amanda C. Owings, Michael DeGiorgio, Alida de Flamingh, Charlene Nijmeh, Monica V. Arellano, Alan Leventhal, Noah A. Rosenberg, and Ripan S. Malhi. "Ancient and modern genomics of the Ohlone Indigenous population of California" Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (2022). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2111533119
