A new analysis of the rare mitochondrial DNA haplogroup C4c in Native American populations shows that it has a parallel genetic history with the X2a haplogroup thought by some to indicate a connection between early Paleoindians in eastern North America and the Upper Paleolithic Solutrean culture in France and Spain.
According to Baharak Hooshiar Kashani, of the Dipartimento di Genetica e Microbiologia at the Universita di Pavia in Italy, and his several co-authors, C4c has clear roots in Asia and is found in Great Lakes and Great Plains Native American populations.
These are the same areas in which the X2a haplogroup has been identified suggesting that “these two lineages possibly arrived together from Beringia with the same Paleo-Indian group(s) that entered North America from Beringia through the ice-free corridor between the Laurentide and Cordilleran ice sheets” at around 18-15,000 years ago.
The researchers further conclude that this finding “definitively dismisses the controversial hypothesis of an Atlantic glacial entry route into North America.”
The paper was published in the latest volume of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Vol. 147, pages 35-39.