The Q1 Y-chromosomal haplogroup subclade and mosquito-infested swamps

This video is of historical linguist Edward Vajda who has been conducting extensive research on the Ket language and its possible link to the Na-Dene languages of various indigenous North American populations. If true, it would be the oldest known link between two languages and the first link between North American and Eurasian langauges.

But even more fascinating, as evidenced by this video, is the research on the Ket people, a vanishing tribe whose survival is described as being almost a “fluke”.

Vajda also adduced a fair amount of non-linguistic evidence, including analyses of Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA haplogroups, which are passed unchanged down the male and female lines, respectively, except for mutations. His most compelling DNA evidence is the Q1 Y-chromosomal haplogroup subclade, which he notes arose c. 15,000 years ago and is found in nearly all Native Americans and nearly all of the Yeniseian Ket people (90%), but almost nowhere else in Eurasia except for the Selkup people (65%), who have intermarried with the Ket people for centuries. Using this and other evidence, he proposes a Proto-Dené-Yeniseian homeland located in eastern Siberia around the Amur and Aldan Rivers. These people would have been hunter-gatherers — as are the modern Yeniseians, but unlike nearly all other Siberian groups (except for some Paleosiberian peoples located around the Pacific Rim of far eastern Siberia, who appear genetically unrelated to the Yeniseians). Eventually all descendants in Eurasia were eliminated by the spread of reindeer-breeding pastoralist peoples (e.g. the speakers of Altaic languages) except for the modern Yeniseians, who were able to survive in swampy refuges far to the west along the Yenisei River because it is too mosquito-infested for reindeer to survive easily. Contrarily, the caribou (the North American equivalent of the reindeer) was never domesticated, and thus the modern Na-Dené people were not similarly threatened.[6]

from the Wikipedia article “Dené–Yeniseian languages”; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Den%C3%A9%E2%80%93Yeniseian_languages