Классификация коренных народов Америки: культура, география и генетика.

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The classification of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas is based upon cultural regions, geography, and linguistics. Anthropologists have named various cultural regions, with fluid boundaries, that are generally agreed upon with some variation. These cultural regions are broadly based upon the locations of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas from early European and African contact beginning in the late 15th century. When Indigenous peoples have been forcibly removed by nation states, they retain their original geographic classification. Some groups span multiple cultural regions.

In the United States and Canada, ethnographers commonly classify Indigenous peoples into ten geographical regions with shared cultural traits, called cultural areas. Greenland is part of the Arctic region. Some scholars combine the Plateau and Great Basin regions into the Intermontane West, some separate Prairie peoples from Great Plains peoples, while some separate Great Lakes tribes from the Northeastern Woodlands.

Indigenous languages of the Americas (or Amerindian Languages) are spoken by Indigenous peoples from the southern tip of South America to Alaska and Greenland, encompassing the land masses which constitute the Americas. These Indigenous languages consist of dozens of distinct language families as well as many language isolates and unclassified languages. Many proposals to group these into higher level families have been made. According to UNESCO, most of the Indigenous American languages in North America are critically endangered and many of them are already extinct.

The haplogroup most commonly associated with Indigenous Americans is Haplogroup Q1a3a (Y DNA). Y DNA, like (mtDNA), differs from other nuclear chromosomes in that the majority of the Y chromosome is unique and does not recombine during meiosis. This has the effect that the historical pattern of mutations can more easily be studied. The pattern indicates Indigenous peoples of the Americas experienced two very distinctive genetic episodes; first with the initial peopling of the Americas, and secondly with European colonization of the Americas. The former is the determinant factor for the number of gene lineages and founding haplotypes present in today's Indigenous American populations. The micro satellite diversity and distributions of the Y lineage specific to South America indicates that certain Amerindian populations have been isolated since the initial colonization of the region. The Na Dené, Inuit and Indigenous Alaskan populations exhibit haplogroup Q (Y DNA) mutations, however are distinct from other Indigenous Americans with various mtDNA mutations. This suggests that the earliest migrants into the northern extremes of North America and Greenland derived from later populations.