# Population Genetics > Autosomal Genetics >  The Genetic Diversity of the Americas

## Angela

See:

Adhikari et al
http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs...article-denial

"The history of the Americas involved the encounter of millions of Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans. A variable admixture of these three continental groups has taken place throughout the continent, influenced by demography and a range of social factors. This variable admixture has had a major influence on the genetic makeup of populations across the continent. Here, we summarize the demographic history of the region, highlight some social factors that affected historical admixture, and review major patterns of ancestry across the Western Hemisphere based on genetic data."

Click on the chart below to enlarge.

Adhikari et al-The Genetic Diversity of the Americas.jpg

It corroborates things that I thought might be true, i.e. Uruguay is more "European" than Argentina, Costa Rica is more "European" than the other Central American countries. In Brazil, despite the high numbers of mixed people, there are really large numbers of basically European people, often the descendants of Italian and German immigrants, like the Pope.

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## davef

I'm 100 percent mixed breed! 

Mutt Pride World Wide! 

I'll confuse the crap out of any DNA test...bring it on!

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## truth_seeker

A few general questions. I am new. I have haplogroup results of I1 and U5 from a previous test done by ancestrybydna. 

My mother and sister have done Ancestry.com, so they have no haplogroup information. Just origins.

Recently I submitted my sample to Living DNA. So I will have a 2nd look at father and mother line haplogroups. Plus regional estimates.

I selected that company, since nearly 3/4 of my ancestry is likely British Isles. And I can compare origins to my sister, using different companies.

How are father and mother line haplogroups determined or estimated?

My ancestry is nearly 100% European. I have fairly extensive genealogy detail. For example my I1 haplogroup is fully supported by several generations of males going back in central Sweden.

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## Angela

> A few general questions. I am new. I have haplogroup results of I1 and U5 from a previous test done by ancestrybydna. 
> 
> My mother and sister have done Ancestry.com, so they have no haplogroup information. Just origins.
> 
> Recently I submitted my sample to Living DNA. So I will have a 2nd look at father and mother line haplogroups. Plus regional estimates.
> 
> I selected that company, since nearly 3/4 of my ancestry is likely British Isles. And I can compare origins to my sister, using different companies.
> 
> How are father and mother line haplogroups determined or estimated?
> ...


Your results are unremarkable for a northwestern Europe: totally "normal".

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## I1a3_Young

> A few general questions. I am new. I have haplogroup results of I1 and U5 from a previous test done by ancestrybydna. 
> 
> My mother and sister have done Ancestry.com, so they have no haplogroup information. Just origins.
> 
> Recently I submitted my sample to Living DNA. So I will have a 2nd look at father and mother line haplogroups. Plus regional estimates.
> 
> I selected that company, since nearly 3/4 of my ancestry is likely British Isles. And I can compare origins to my sister, using different companies.
> 
> How are father and mother line haplogroups determined or estimated?
> ...


The Ancestry.com data file has the info for haplogroups. You can browse it manually if you know what you are doing or upload it for free to www.WeGene.com/en

The mtDNA coverage is not good but I was able to get a U5 person to U5b2a1. On the other hand, "H" will show simply as R0.

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## Tomenable

The USA surely has more of Amerindian ancestry than that graph shows.

Remember that apart from Native Americans you also have a lot of Latinos.

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## Tomenable

On GEDmatch I found several dozens of Native North Americans from the USA and Canada who are 100-95% Native. Here are some examples, they are not scientific samples from studies, just normal people who ordered DNA tests:

A300070 
M961337 
M316975 
M545193 
A335991 
M472704 
M627153 
M336775 
M288199 
T608797 
A920346 
A789673 
T457136 
A457107 
A590677 
A049124 
T778541 
T466070 
T660223 
A266728 
T534912 
M091694 
A096508 
A017363 
T513546 
A273875

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## Tomenable

Here is a list of Native North Americans that I found so far, including mixed ones:

After finding them, I checked their results in MDLP World-22:

https://i.imgur.com/2BxR08V.png

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## Angela

There are only 5.4 million Native Americans in the U.S., which is 2% of the population,and those people, like African-Americans, are often 20-30% European.
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/fact...cb15-ff22.html

As far as white Americans are concerned there are a lot of them and of black Americans as well who thought they had Amerindian ancestry, but it turns out very few actually have it. 

In terms of Hispanics, it's difficult to get a fix on it, because Hispanic is a linguistic grouping, not a "racial" one, although one can sometimes get data on "white" vs "non-white" Hispanics. There are Hispanics from Cuba and Latin America, for example, who vary widely in their amount of Native ancestry, sometimes having at most a couple of percent. Puerto Ricans are a mixed bag, but are only, on average, 12% Amerindian.

The largest group, and the group with the highest percentage, are Mexican Americans. They make up about 11% of the population. Again, the percentage Amerindian can vary a lot (52% self-identify as white), with some having perhaps 10%, some a lot more, but the average is probably around 35%. 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Americans

Central Americans also vary by country or origin, with some being largely Amerindian, and some more Mexican like. However, they're a much smaller portion of the population.

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## Promenade

> The USA surely has more of Amerindian ancestry than that graph shows.
> 
> Remember that apart from Native Americans you also have a lot of Latinos.


The problem is that neither of you read the graph correctly

@Angela that graph is not their genetic admixture, but the "perceived" admixture. Basically it's just census data about race, how the individuals from each country view their ancestry. I mean it'd be pretty lazy of the authors to make a "mixed" and "other" category for genetic results right?

The paper is behind a paywall, but the supplementary material has some interesting tidbits, tables 7 and 8 are where they have the estimated genetic admixture. You can see that places with greater European admixture also had relatively low native population size and population density upon discovery by the western world, for example Uruguay and Argentina. (Although Argentina does still have a very significant amount of Native ancestry, over 30 percent, in fact the European mixture in Havana is greater than Buenos Aires.) Also it's amusing to think that Bolivia's population was once roughly equivalent to that of a country as massive as Brazil and greater than that of the United States and Canada combined.

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## Angela

> The problem is that neither of you read the graph correctly
> 
> @*Angela that graph is not their genetic admixture, but the "perceived" admixture.* Basically it's just census data about race, how the individuals from each country view their ancestry. I mean it'd be pretty lazy of the authors to make a "mixed" and "other" category for genetic results right?
> 
> The paper is behind a paywall, but the supplementary material has some interesting tidbits, tables 7 and 8 are where they have the estimated genetic admixture. You can see that places with greater European admixture also had relatively low native population size and population density upon discovery by the western world, for example Uruguay and Argentina. (Although Argentina does still have a very significant amount of Native ancestry, over 30 percent, in fact the European mixture in Havana is greater than Buenos Aires.) Also it's amusing to think that Bolivia's population was once roughly equivalent to that of a country as massive as Brazil and greater than that of the United States and Canada combined.


I know. My reading comprehension is quite good, thank-you. I'm aware of what "perceived" means. I would assume that Tomenable's English is also up to understanding it. 

My post is a response to Tomenable's statement that there's a lot more "actual" Amerindian in the U.S. than appears on that chart. It was meant to show that there is more, although perhaps not as much as Tomenable thought.

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## Promenade

> I know. My reading comprehension is quite good, thank-you. I'm aware of what "perceived" means. I would assume that Tomenable's English is also up to understanding it. 
> 
> My post is a response to Tomenable's statement that there's a lot more "actual" Amerindian in the U.S. than appears on that chart. It was meant to show that there is more, although perhaps not as much as Tomenable thought.


Oh I wasn't trying to criticize anyone's reading comprehension, but to me there seemed to be some confusion over the graph. I wrongly assumed that most people realized that hispanics in the US, who are often mixed, simply refer to themselves as white which would obscure the mixed and Amerindian percentage in American perceived ancestry. So I thought he must have believed it was showing the genetic admixture, especially since he assumed the Amerindian ancestry would be higher due to latinos which are a predominately mixed population and a separate category here. 

Yes you are right, we don't have many Native Americans left so the amerindian percentage would be obscure, but if the hispanic population was described more accurately mixed ancestry would be much higher. I know hispanics that are genetically less than 50 percent european, but still see themselves predominately as white rather than mixed. So in a genetic sense Tomenable is right, we are more Amerindian than shown here, but in a demographic sense we are not. Hispanics are demographically seen as white, even if they were considered mixed it would not influence the amerindian percentages in a demographic sense since it is labeled as it's own category here apart from amerindian.

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## Wheal

IMO there was a large number of people who had some African heritage that left their states of birth in the east to settle in newly opened territories in the Midwest, following the civil war, and told their children they were Amerind heritage.

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## Angela

> Oh I wasn't trying to criticize anyone's reading comprehension, but to me there seemed to be some confusion over the graph. I wrongly assumed that most people realized that hispanics in the US, who are often mixed, simply refer to themselves as white which would obscure the mixed and Amerindian percentage in American perceived ancestry. So I thought he must have believed it was showing the genetic admixture, especially since he assumed the Amerindian ancestry would be higher due to latinos which are a predominately mixed population and a separate category here. 
> 
> Yes you are right, we don't have many Native Americans left so the amerindian percentage would be obscure, but if the hispanic population was described more accurately mixed ancestry would be much higher. I know hispanics that are genetically less than 50 percent european, but still see themselves predominately as white rather than mixed. So in a genetic sense Tomenable is right, we are more Amerindian than shown here, but in a demographic sense we are not. Hispanics are demographically seen as white, even if they were considered mixed it would not influence the amerindian percentages in a demographic sense since it is labeled as it's own category here apart from amerindian.


I think there's often a difference between how Hispanics "perceive" themselves, and how they are "perceived" by "white" Americans. There's also a difference by national "origin".

Dominicans are perceived as "black" despite the fact that they speak Spanish, and I doubt they perceive themselves as "white", although they might identify on a census form as a "non-white Hispanic". 

Likewise, I don't think most of the recent Central American immigrants, who look very "Amerindian" are perceived as white, however they might identify. 

I don't think most people think of Puerto Ricans in general as white, either. Some do look mostly white, but a lot look mixed if not black, so it depends. With Mexicans, again, I don't think most people see the average Mexican as white, although the reality is that it depends very much on individuals. There are Mexicans who have very small amounts of non-white ancestry, and so look white to others, as do "white" Cubans, and Mexicans who are over 50% Amerindian, plus that 5% or so SSA that a lot of them seem to get, and really do look like admixed people. 

As for people who do identify as Amerindian, even ones who are enrolled on tribal lists, the average person has a hefty chunk of European, even if they look mostly "Indian". A lot of Amerindians don't test precisely because they're not comfortable finding out they have "white" ancestry. 

It's all very complicated, right? We've just learned "white" South Africans are, on average, 6% non-white. So, why shouldn't Mexicans and Cubans with similar amounts of non-white ancestry consider themselves, and be considered, white?

People just shouldn't be obsessed with this kind of "racial" characterization,imo. It all becomes either racist or political. On the one hand you have the old "racial" rules coming out of the south, like the "one drop" rule where any SSA ancestry whatsoever relegated you to the non-white world, to the Thomas Jefferson's, who arbitrarily decided that once you were only 1/32 black you were white, to African-Americans who are less than half SSA identifying as African, or people who are identifying as Jewish when they never converted, don't practice Judaism, and have one remote Jewish ancestor.

Everyone would be much better off if they stopped "labeling" themselves and others by color or facial characteristics.

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## Promenade

> IMO there was a large number of people who had some African heritage that left their states of birth in the east to settle in newly opened territories in the Midwest, following the civil war, and told their children they were Amerind heritage.


That's pretty interesting, I never heard of that before but it makes sense. Is there any actual evidence for this though?





> I think there's often a difference between how Hispanics "perceive" themselves, and how they are "perceived" by "white" Americans. There's also a difference by national "origin".
> 
> Dominicans are perceived as "black" despite the fact that they speak Spanish, and I doubt they perceive themselves as "white", although they might identify on a census form as a "non-white Hispanic". 
> 
> Likewise, I don't think most of the recent Central American immigrants, who look very "Amerindian" are perceived as white, however they might identify. 
> 
> I don't think most people think of Puerto Ricans in general as white, either. Some do look mostly white, but a lot look mixed if not black, so it depends. With Mexicans, again, I don't think most people see the average Mexican as white, although the reality is that it depends very much on individuals. There are Mexicans who have very small amounts of non-white ancestry, and so look white to others, as do "white" Cubans, and Mexicans who are over 50% Amerindian, plus that 5% or so SSA that a lot of them seem to get, and really do look like admixed people. 
> 
> As for people who do identify as Amerindian, even ones who are enrolled on tribal lists, the average person has a hefty chunk of European, even if they look mostly "Indian". A lot of Amerindians don't test precisely because they're not comfortable finding out they have "white" ancestry. 
> ...


I don't believe it's necessarily complicated, you just have to look at the individual cultures social views and history to see why people are labeled one way or identify with another label while in another society or country things are perceived differently. Because in reality these terms are subjective and shaped by prejudices and history and only somewhat vaguely fall back on objective standards. I mean South Africans wanted to be perceived as white as a matter of survival in an apartheid state, but they also have fairer features, and according to this study less non-European admixture than many proclaimed Hispanic whites have.

I agree though, people divide themselves along racial lines too much, especially in the modern era. It's interesting how Romans and ancient societies cared little about these things and it's importance has instead increased with time.(Indian caste system might be considered an exception to this rule) These divisions most obviously derive from the colonial era and what proceeded, but the Romans themselves contacted many people of varying features and incorporated them without too much trouble. I'd say culture/religion was the larger issue there and the biggest group they struggled with were the Jews because of the clash between Monotheism and the Roman pantheon. By the time independent nations arose in the Americas, the Paraguayan dictator Jose Francia perceived racial differences as such a threat he went as far as to ban non-miscegenous marriages to protect the countries well being and in the US we saw the opposite in some states.

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## italouruguayan

I'm from Montevideo (Uruguay). It seems to me that Angela's analysis is very close to the reality of Latin America. In reference to my country, in elementary school they told us that "90% of Uruguayans are white and the other 10% are blacks". Native American tribes were always scarce, and the main one of them, the Charrúas, was exterminated at the beginning of the independent republic (at that time they lived in Uruguay less than 100,000 people!) for being "an obstacle to progress". Then immigration was encouraged, mainly from Europeans but also from the Middle East (at the end of the 19th century, half of Montevideo's population was foreign). Blacks were scarce, since the main economic activity, the breeding of cattle, required little slave labor. And the Native American survivors mingled with the rest of the population. This led to the constitution of the current population of Uruguay, of which perhaps I can serve as an average example (the result of my genetic analysis, according to Geno 2.0 Next Generation, is: Southern Europe 58%, Native American 14%, Western / Central Europe 9%, Arabia 9 %. Western / Central Africa 3%, Jewish Diaspora 3%, SE Asia / Oceania 2%), although there are people of predominantly African origin, Native American, or, like my own father, 100% European (Italian ).

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## Angela

> I'm from Montevideo (Uruguay). It seems to me that Angela's analysis is very close to the reality of Latin America. In reference to my country, in elementary school they told us that "90% of Uruguayans are white and the other 10% are blacks". Native American tribes were always scarce, and the main one of them, the Charrúas, was exterminated at the beginning of the independent republic (at that time they lived in Uruguay less than 100,000 people!) for being "an obstacle to progress". Then immigration was encouraged, mainly from Europeans but also from the Middle East (at the end of the 19th century, half of Montevideo's population was foreign). Blacks were scarce, since the main economic activity, the breeding of cattle, required little slave labor. And the Native American survivors mingled with the rest of the population. This led to the constitution of the current population of Uruguay, of which perhaps I can serve as an average example (the result of my genetic analysis, according to Geno 2.0 Next Generation, is: Southern Europe 58%, Native American 14%, Western / Central Europe 9%, Arabia 9 %. Western / Central Africa 3%, Jewish Diaspora 3%, SE Asia / Oceania 2%), although there are people of predominantly African origin, Native American, or, like my own father, 100% European (Italian ).


There's been a lot of analysis of the populations of various Latin American countries. Each one is slightly different.

What people don't realize is that there was a lot of migration from Italy to some Latin American countries, primarily Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil. Not every Latin American country has the racial make-up of Peru or Ecuador or Guatemala. I myself have distant cousins from Argentina. The one from that group who has tested is 95% European, but carries an Amerindian mtdna acquired through intermarriage. 

There are some people from those countries who carry more Amerindian, and some, probably older, who have none. The current pope, although a proud Argentinian, is 100% Northwestern Italian genetically. 

"Jorge Mario Bergoglio was born on 17 December 1936[2] in Flores,[3] a neighborhood of Buenos Aires.[2] He was the eldest[4] of five children of Mario José Bergoglio (1908–1959) and Regina María Sívori (1911–1981). Mario Bergoglio was an Italian immigrant accountant[5] born in Portacomaro (Province of Asti) in Italy's Piedmont region. Regina Sívori[6] was a housewife born in Buenos Aires to a family of northern Italian (Piedmontese-Genoese) origin.[7][8][9] Mario José's family left Italy in 1929 to escape the fascist rule of Benito Mussolini.[10] According to María Elena Bergoglio, the Pope's only living sibling, they did not emigrate for economic reasons.[11]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Francis








As you say, Uruguay had few Amerindians or blacks, Argentina more, and Brazil yet more, yet those highly "European" clusters still exist in even Brazil. It's a question of how much European immigration is relatively recent, I think, as well the make up of the population prior to the European arrival.

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## Wheal

> That's pretty interesting, I never heard of that before but it makes sense. Is there any actual evidence for this though?


I think there is DNA evidence within families. I have helped several families with their genealogy and after finding a migration following an NPE they decided on DNA testing to figure out who they matched. Their family history was that they were part Amerind. The DNA tested at 7% and greater Central African with 0 Amerind. The migration took place in the mid 1700's. IMO this would be a hint of evidence and probably a great study.

The DNA for these particular families is private, so of course I can not discuss them in detail or give information.

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## Jangozo

Well, being Brazilian myself it's...interesting. I did my Autosomal at FTDNA than uploaded it at My Heritage and stayed hours trying everything at GEDmatch.

After tracing everything, trying to make some sense within family knowledge etc the final result would be something like this:

- 65% European (25% Italian, 15% Iberian, 15% Northern European, 5% Balkan, 5% Ashkenazi)
- 18% African (13% Nigerian, 5% Berber)
- 10% Asian (2% Uzbek, 5% Balochi e 3% Indian) 
- 7% Native American (Being the majority Central American...well, weird isn't it?)

Yes, we have a insane melting pot here.

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## Hauteville

Uruguayans and Argentineans have significant Italian blood but there is some Amerindian even there.

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## Angela

> Uruguayans and Argentineans have significant Italian blood but there is some Amerindian even there.


For a long time my closest "relative" in terms of IBD sharing at 23andme was an elderly Argentinian who had been part of a disease study of some kind. His ancestry was all from the LaSpezia/Lunigiana area. His children were also in 23andme, and they carried Amerindian mtDna. 

I think that's very common. The amount varies, though.

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## Wheal

@Angela do you think that it's possible that the Amerindian is actually from when the America's were populated over the land bridge?

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## Angela

> @Angela do you think that it's possible that the Amerindian is actually from when the America's were populated over the land bridge?


I'd say the Americas were populated mostly but not completely through one migration from Siberia which may have begun with coastal water routes after the last Ice Age.

You might be interested in this paper by Pontus Skoglund and David Reich of Harvard:

"A genomic view of the peopling of the Americas"
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5161672/

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