After careful review, the Editorial Board believes sufficient evidence exists to support this accusation. The article duplicates significant paragraphs from other published papers. Re-use of any data should be appropriately cited. As such this article represents a severe abuse of the scientific publishing system. The scientific community takes a very strong view on this matter and apologies are offered to readers of the journal that this was not detected during the submission

process. “
“The consensus view of the peopling of the Americas, incorporating archaeological, linguistic and genetic evidence, proposes colonization by a small founder population from Northeast Asia via Beringia 15–20 Kya (thousand years ago), followed by one or two additional migrations also via Alaska, contributing only to the gene pools of North Americans, and little subsequent

migration into the Americas selleck kinase inhibitor south of the Arctic Circle before the voyages from Europe initiated by Columbus in 1492 [1]. In the most detailed genetic analysis thus far, for example, Reich and colleagues [2] identified three sources of Native American ancestry: a ‘First selleck American’ stream contributing to all Native populations, a second stream contributing only to Eskimo-Aleut-speaking Arctic populations, and a third stream contributing only to a Na-Dene-speaking North American population. Nevertheless, there is strong evidence for additional long-distance contacts between the Americas and other continents between these initial migrations and 1492. Norse explorers reached North America around 1000 CE and established a short-lived colony, documented

in the Vinland Sagas and supported by archaeological excavations [3]. The sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) was domesticated in South America (probably Peru), but combined genetic and historical analyses demonstrate that it was transported from South America to Polynesia before 1000–1100 CE [4]. Some inhabitants of Easter Island (Rapa Nui) carry HLA alleles characteristic of South America, most readily explained by gene flow after the colonization of the island around 1200 CE but before European contact in 1722 [5]. In Brazil, two nineteenth-century Botocudo skulls carrying the mtDNA Polynesian motif have been reported, and a Pre-Columbian date for ADP ribosylation factor entry of this motif into the Americas discussed, although a more recent date was considered more likely [6]. Thus South America was in two-way contact with other continental regions in prehistoric times, but there is currently no unequivocal evidence for outside gene flow into South America between the initial colonization by the ‘First American’ stream and European contact. The Y chromosome has a number of advantages for studies of human migrations. Haplotypes over most of its length are male-specific and evolve along stable lineages only by the accumulation of mutations, and the small male effective population size results in high levels of genetic drift of these haplotypes [7].