DNA reveals that Native Americans came from Central Russia!

[RZM]

14. Hate to rain on parades here

But this isn't actually all that new in an ethnic sense, as some seem to be interpreting it. It's not evidence that American Indians are descended form the Russians we think of today. Those people originated further West and didn't spread into 'European Russia' until relatively recently, something more like 1500 years ago. And the Altai region isn't even part of European Russia. It's more like Central Asia (it's nestled between what are now Mongolia, China, and Kazakhstan).

People may be getting tripped up because it's part of the Russian Federation, which is the largest country on earth and includes a myriad of ethnic groups. But the enormous Russia we think of controlled by ethnic Russians is a relatively recent phenomenon, especially considering the time scales we're talking about here.

Ethnic Russians didn't expand there until the early modern period, when they colonized Siberia and slowly took control of land that had once been part of the Mongol hordes. The core of Russian civilization as we know it was still a relatively modest tract of land centered around Muscovy/Ukraine until they began expanding after the end of Mongol rule there. That's one of the biggest ironies of Russian history. Popular opinion holds that Russia has frequently been a target of invasions, but in fact it's always been highly expansionist. From roughly the 17th-19th centuries, Russia grew by about the size of a Holland every single year, when you average the gains over the entire period.

I'm not sure exactly when the Altai region was firmly under Russian control (and colonized with ethnic Russians, who comprise a little over half of the population there today) but it probably wasn't until the 18th century at the very earliest. Some areas in Central Asia held out until the late 19th century.

Bottom line, if you have Native American blood, this study doesn't mean you're all that closely related to Putin. More like you're related to the non-Russians who live in Altai, who look a lot more like Sitting Bull than they look like Putin