There’s a New Theory About Native Americans’ Origins

New research is turning a centuries-old hypothesis about Native Americans’ origins on its head. A team of geneticists and anthropologists published an article in Science on Tuesday that traces Native Americans to a single group that settled in what’s now America far later than what scientists previously thought. The researchers looked at sequenced DNA from bones as well as the sequenced genomes of Native American volunteers with heritage from not only the Americas but also Siberia and Oceania, says according to Rasmus Nielsen, a computational geneticist at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of the authors of the study. The researchers contacted people whose heritage indicated they were of Amerindian or Athanbascan—the two ethnic derivations of Native Americans—descent. Specifically, they looked at their mitochondrial DNA (mDNA), which is passed from mother to child. What they found fundamentally changes what scientists previously thought. The team found that Native Americans most likely had a common Siberian origin, contradicting theories that an earlier migration from Europe occurred. The timeline Rasmus and his colleagues propose goes something like this: About 23,000 years ago, a single group splintered off from an East Asian population. The group, hailing from northeast Asia, crossed the Bering Land Bridge between northeast Asia and Alaska, eventually making their way to the rest of the Americas. About 13,000 years ago—much more...
Source: TIME: Top Science and Health Stories - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized anthropology Genetics migration Native Americans Research Science Source Type: news