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Ancestry populations · Classical Antiquity

Native American

The Indigenous peoples of the Americas in the three thousand years before European contact, from Caribbean islanders and the Maya to Andean peoples. One of the 50 curated source populations in the Classical Antiquity era of Ancient Ancestry, Ancestrify's qpAdm analysis.

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Who they were

Artistic interpretation of the Native American (AI-generated artwork, not documentary evidence)
Period
1500 BC to 1500 AD
Era in the analysis
Classical Antiquity
Region
The Americas
Role in the model
Source (left) population, a reference qpAdm tests against

This source gathers the Indigenous peoples of the Americas who lived in the three thousand years before European contact, from every part of the hemisphere. In the Caribbean they include the hunter-gatherers of Cuba and the pottery-making villagers who spread through the islands from the coast of northeastern South America (Nägele et al. 2020; Fernandes et al. 2021). In Mexico they include the Maya of Chichén Itzá (Barquera et al. 2024) and communities of the north, and on the California coast and the Channel Islands the fishing peoples who lived by the sea for thousands of years (Scheib et al. 2018; Nakatsuka et al. 2023). Further south they include the highland people of the Bogotá plateau (Krettek et al. 2025), the builders of Tiwanaku beside Lake Titicaca (Popović et al. 2021), the peoples of the Argentine plains (Maravall-López et al. 2025) and the shell-mound builders of the Brazilian coast (Ferraz et al. 2023).

All of them descend from the founding population that entered the Americas from Siberia and Beringia more than fifteen thousand years ago (Raghavan et al. 2015; Moreno-Mayar et al. 2018), yet their histories diverged. The Archaic hunter-gatherers of the Caribbean were almost entirely replaced by the ceramic-using settlers, apart from a community in western Cuba that survived until Europeans arrived (Fernandes et al. 2021); around Bogotá the earliest hunter-gatherers gave way to newcomers whose ancestry came from Central America (Krettek et al. 2025); the Chumash and their forebears can be followed for some seven thousand years on the Channel Islands and the Santa Barbara coast (Nakatsuka et al. 2023); and in central Argentina a previously unknown lineage persisted for eight millennia (Maravall-López et al. 2025). Millions of people across Latin America and the Caribbean carry this ancestry today, in very different proportions (Ruiz-Linares et al. 2014), although few pre-Columbian haplotypes survive in the islands themselves (Moreno-Estrada et al. 2013).

In Ancient Ancestry, Ancestrify's qpAdm analysis, Native American is a source in the "Classical Antiquity" era. The report shows its weight with a standard error and a Z-score, so you can see not only how much of the model it carries but how confidently that share is separated from zero, and a model that cannot support it is rejected rather than published. It is the New World source of this era; the older Native American source of the Hunter Gatherer and Neolithic Farmer era describes the deep founding population, and a Classical Antiquity model uses this one. Many genomes from the Caribbean and Latin America carry only a small Native American share, and the Z-score is what shows whether such a share is separated from zero or lost in the noise.

Y haplogroup Q, above all its Q-M3 branch, and the mtDNA lineages A2, B2, C1 and D1 characterise these samples. A haplogroup alone is never evidence of a share.

In your report

This population brings together the Indigenous peoples of the Americas who lived in the three thousand years before European contact, from about 1500 BC to AD 1500. They come from every part of the hemisphere. In the Caribbean they include the hunter-gatherers of Cuba and the pottery-making villagers of Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, the Bahamas and the Lesser Antilles, whose ancestors had paddled north from the coast of Venezuela and whose descendants became the Taino. In Mexico they include the Maya of Chichen Itza and the farming communities of the north, and on the California coast and the Channel Islands, fishing peoples who lived by the sea for thousands of years. Further south they include farmers of the high plateau around Bogota, the builders of Tiwanaku in the Bolivian highlands, the peoples of the Argentine plains and the shell-mound builders of the Brazilian coast. Many grew maize, manioc, squash and beans, while others lived by fishing, gathering shellfish and hunting. Their distant ancestors had entered the Americas from Siberia more than fifteen thousand years earlier. Millions of people across Latin America and the Caribbean carry this ancestry today, alongside ancestry from Europe and Africa that arrived after 1492.

Artwork is an AI-generated artistic interpretation informed by the archaeological record, not documentary evidence.

Where this population sits in the model

Ancient Ancestry, our qpAdm analysis, models your genome once per era. The Classical Antiquity era has 50 curated source populations, and Native American is one of them: every candidate model for that era is a combination of these sources, tested against a fixed set of outgroup populations, and only a model that passes the statistical fit check is published, with a p-value and a standard error on every proportion.

A reference, not a verdict: every population on this page is a source the model tests your genome against, a well-sampled point in ancient genetic space that a mixture of ancestries can be expressed in terms of. A weight on it means your genome is well described as partly resembling those people; it is never a statement that they, specifically, were your ancestors, and a population that fits well is not the only one that could.

Read how qpAdm works on the Ancient Ancestry page, or the definitions in the glossary.

Model it yourself for free

The Ancestrify Lab runs in your browser, with no account. Paste a Global25 row into an admixture calculator that covers the Classical Antiquity era, rank the closest ancient populations in the distance tool, or run f4, qpWave and qpAdm on the public panel in the AdmixTools 2 workbench. These are Global25 fits and exploratory statistics, not the formal qpAdm model of Ancient Ancestry.

Questions

  • Who were the Native American (1500 BC to 1500 AD)?

    Native American is one of the 50 curated source populations in the Classical Antiquity era of Ancient Ancestry, Ancestrify's qpAdm analysis: a group of published genomes pooled as a single reference the model can test your genome against. These are ancient individuals from one archaeological context wherever the record holds them, and present-day genomes standing in where it does not, which the description on this page says.

  • Does Native American in my result mean they were my ancestors?

    No. A source population is a reference the model tests against, never a statement about who your ancestors were. A coefficient on this source means the ancestry those burials represent helps explain your genome to within statistical noise: similar ancestry composition, not descent from those individuals. Ancestrify never claims a population is your ancestor.

  • What does a Native American percentage in a qpAdm model mean?

    qpAdm estimates the mixture proportions that best explain your genome as a combination of the chosen sources, given a fixed set of outgroup (right) populations, and reports a p-value for whether the model is statistically acceptable together with a standard error for every proportion. The percentage is that estimated share, with its uncertainty published beside it.

  • How do I get a qpAdm model that uses Native American?

    Order Ancient Ancestry, Ancestrify's qpAdm analysis (€29.99, one-time), and upload the raw file you already have from a consumer test. Your genome is merged into the AADR reference panel and modelled across both eras; each era's model is built from that era's source populations, so a model for the Classical Antiquity era draws on Native American where it improves the fit.

  • Can I model Native American ancestry for free first?

    Yes. The Ancestrify Lab runs Global25 admixture calculators, a nearest-populations distance tool and an AdmixTools 2 workbench in your browser with no account, and several calculators cover the Classical Antiquity era. Those are G25 fits, not formal qpAdm models. Ancient Ancestry, the paid analysis, is the one with a p-value.

More populations from the Classical Antiquity era

Browse the full directory of source populations, or continue with another population from the same era:

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