Traces of early Eurasians in the Mansi of northwest Siberia revealed by mitochondrial DNA analysis

Abstract

The mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) of 98 Mansi, an ancient group (formerly known as "Vogul") of Uralic-speaking fishers and hunters on the eastern slope of the northern Ural Mountains, were analyzed for sequence variants by restriction fragment--length polymorphism analysis, control-region sequencing, and sequencing of additional informative sites in the coding region. Although 63.3% of the mtDNA detected in the Mansi falls into western Eurasian lineages (e.g., haplogroups UK, TJ, and HV), the remaining 36.7% encompass a subset of eastern Eurasian lineages (e.g., haplogroups A, C, D, F, G, and M). Among the western Eurasian lineages, subhaplogroup U4 was found at a remarkable frequency of 16.3%, along with lineages U5, U7, and J2. This suggests that the aboriginal populations residing immediately to the east of the Ural Mountains may encompass remnants of the early Upper Paleolithic expansion from the Middle East/southeastern Europe. The added presence of eastern Eurasian mtDNA lineages in the Mansi introduces the possibilities that proto-Eurasians encompassed a range of macrohaplogroup M and N lineages that subsequently became geographically distributed and that the Paleolithic expansion may have reached this part of Siberia before it split into western and eastern human groups.

Figure 1

A map of northwestern Siberia, indicating the locations of the two Mansi populations sampled.

Figure 2

Schematic phylogenetic representation of mtDNA lineages found in the Mansi. The sizes of the circles, which denote lineages, are proportional to the number of sampled individuals. Mutations are transitions unless otherwise specified. Squares denote the phylogenetic position of the roots of the nested haplogroups R, N, L3, and M (Macaulay et al. ; Quintana-Murci et al. 1999)