Novel B2 mitogenomes Southern Patagonia's Late Holocene (Salitroso Lake)
Genetic information recovered from human skeletal remains, as well as from current populations, has been at the center of the latest models of peopling of the American continent. The mitochondrial sublineage B2b has been proposed as a good marker to trace the different South American migratory waves and routes, although scarcely represented and described in ancient southern Patagonian groups. In order to provide new evidence to discuss the migratory processes and matrilineal relationships that shaped the genetic variability of populations during the peopling of the Southern Cone, two complete mitogenomes were obtained from late Holocene Patagonian individuals buried in the same chenque at Salitroso Lake Basin (Santa Cruz province, Argentina).  The mitogenomes were assigned to haplogroups B2 and B2b, exhibiting an average depth of 54X and 89X (=1X coverage of 98.6% and 100%), and a high number of nucleotide differences between them. The large divergence between both haplotypes suggests either a highly variable founder gene pool for the population that inhabited the basin, or that genetic variability was later enriched by frequent biological contact with other populations.  The results underline the persistence of genetic signals related to the first waves of settlement in South America following the Pacific coast, as well as that the regional settlement of the southern end of the continent has been much more complex than initially thought.