9408934 Judith Kidd An important new area of anthropological genetics involves the analysis of genetic distributions in native North American populations. Analyses of new data on 35 nuclear DNA markers at 23 independent loci tyhped on five Amerindian populations and seven Old World populations show a North- South pattern of gene frequency variation for Amerindian populations with decreased heterozygosity in South America and increasing genetic distance from Asian and other Old World populations in a cline fromNorth America to South America. This patternis most simply explained by an advancing wave of population expansion from north to south in the colonization of the Americas. The objective of this research is to test this hypothesis of the expanding wave in two ways: by studying more Amerindian poulations, a Siberian population, and two western Pacific populations for the same markers and ty typing a minimum of 15 additional nuclear DNA markers, with an emphasis on haplotype markers on all populations. The resulting data will add signifiantly to the u derstanding of how the colonizing populations expanded to "fill" the Americas. ***
