The congruence between pre-Columbian genetic structure and the genetic differentiation of the Mestizo is also evidenced in the correlation of the logarithm of the geographic distance between Mestizo and Native populations, and the size of the corresponding ancestry components (as shown in Figure 6). These correlations are negative for all Mestizo populations (Figure 7), in agreement with a stronger genetic affinity of the Mestizo to Native populations that are geographically closer. The correlations are usually higher when considering an effective geographic distance (a distance considering preferential migration along the coastal outline, see Methods), consistent with the influence of the coasts on Paleolithic Native population dispersals[23]. The mean weighted Pearson correlation coefficient over all mestizo populations is −0.481 (R2 = 0.232) for Euclidean distances and −0.570 (R2 = 0.325) for effective distances.
