Cover image

Cover General consensus among scientists from different disciplines is that Native American populations trace their gene pool to Asian groups who colonized northeast Siberia, including parts of Beringia—the land-bridge that connected North Asia to Alaska during the last glacial period. During that time, these ancestral populations probably retreated into refugia, where their genetic variation was reshaped. In the millennia after the initial Paleo-Indian migrations, other groups also from Beringia or eastern Siberia expanded into North America, contributing at least 15 distinct founder mitochondrial genomes that have survived to the present time. (Cover illustration by Dr. Valeria Carossa, valeria.carossa{at}unipv.it. [For details, see Perego et al., pp. 1174–1179.])