DNA Analysis Shows Native Americans Had European Roots
Last week, the scientists published the results of sequencing the child’s DNA in the scientific journal Nature. Late last year, the same team published the decoded genome of another early human: A juvenile buried near Lake Baikal in Siberia some 24,000 years ago. Their genomes showed surprising ancestral similarities.
This earned Willerslev’s team an astounding publishing achievement in just 100 days: The decoding of the genomes of the oldest analyzed members of homo sapiens in both the Old and the New Worlds. This has allowed them to reconstruct the settlement of the Americas via the Beringia land bridge during the ice ages — when what is now the Bering Strait between Russia and Alaska was frozen over — in greater detail than ever before.
A third of both juveniles’ DNA can be traced to the earliest European. Physical evidence also supports this European origin: Archeologists discovered 30 ivory pendants at Mal’ta, the Stone Age settlement site near Lake Baikal where the remains were found. The pendants show great similarity to ones found at Hohle Fels cave, an important Paleolithic site in southern Germany’s Swabian Jura mountains.
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