At West Hunter, Greg Cochran mentions one of the weirder recent findings in race genomics: some Amerindians, from roughly Panama to Brazil have a moderate amount of ancestry that is most similar to that of the pygmy negritos of the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean:

One very important point, naturally mentioned in none of the press accounts, is is what they didn’t see: the Alaskan kid didn’t have any of the Australo-Melanesian, Andamanese-like component that exists in Amazonian Indians today.

The Andamanese appear representative of an early wave of anatomically modern humans that settled the coastline of the Indian Ocean, getting to New Guinea and Australia. This early wave may even have gone up the coast of East Asia.

Pretty much they were demographically stomped on by later races such as East Asians. Here and there in southeast Asia there are groups of small dark people living in remote places. And a lot of places in East Asia have legends of little black Old Ones who used to live here.

The Andamanese of North Sentinel Island have survived via violent xenophobia, such as shooting a National Geographic photographer in the leg with an arrow.

Here’s my 2002 interview with George H.J. Weber, founder of the Andaman Association and a hero of human biodiversity preservation for taking the lead in persuading the Indian government to stop trying to contact the North Sentinelese. (Contacted Andaman tribes on other islands typically experienced a big die off from pneumonia and other side effects of globalism.)

The Clovis-complex Anzick-1 skeleton from Montana, about 12.6k years old, was a member of the southern Amerindian branch – but it didn’t have any Andamanese-like component either.

So we’re saying that a Beringian population, pretty close to the common ancestors of the Northern and Southern Amerindians branches, didn’t have the Andaman-like admixture.

The Northern branch doesn’t seem to have it today.

Only some members of the Southern branch have it today: the earliest known sample from the southern population doesn’t have it.

Therefore the Southern branch (some of them) very likely picked it up after they left Beringia, also after they split with the northern branch. Which means it was already there before the Amerindians came down from Beringia. Probably in Brazil.

A couple of separate research groups have individually come up with this finding among Amerindians in Latin America.

Granted, there was some slave trade from the Philippines and other islands to Latin America, but this does not appear to be a post-1492 arrival. One estimate of the split-off data for the Australo-Melanesian component found here and there in South American Amerindians from other Australo-Melanesians is 4000 to 40,000 years ago.

It’s unlikely that the Australo-Melanesians arrived in the New World after the Amerindians, since they make up 2% of the ancestry of some tribes in Brazil. They haven’t done well in Asia competing against the distant relatives of Amerindians, so it would be implausible that they arrived in a populated New World and flourished against already well-established American Indian competitors.

So it seems like they must have got there first.

But how?

After all, it’s pretty hard to get from the Andaman Islands to Brazil even today by jet.

[Comment at Unz.com]