The 11,500-Year-Old Remains of a Baby Could Reveal How Humans First Came to the Americas

Ancient DNA extracted from the skull of a six-week-old baby girl whose 11,500-year-old remains were unearthed in a burial pit in central Alaska is helping scientists resolve long-standing controversies about how humans first populated the Americas. Scientists said on Wednesday a study of her genome indicated there was just a single wave of migration into the Americas across a land bridge, now submerged, that spanned the Bering Strait and connected Siberia to Alaska during the Ice Age. The infant — named “sunrise girl-child” (Xach‘itee‘aanenh T‘eede Gaay) using the local indigenous language — belonged to a previously unknown Native American population that descended from those intrepid migrants, the researchers added. “The study provides the first direct genomic evidence that all Native American ancestry can be traced back to the same source population during the last Ice Age,” University of Alaska Fairbanks archaeologist Ben Potter said. The remains of the infant — part of a hunter-gatherer culture that hunted bison, elk, hare, squirrels and birds and caught salmon — were unearthed in 2013 at a prehistoric encampment in Alaska’s Tanana River Valley about 50 miles (80 km) southeast of Fairbanks. Our species first arose in Africa roughly 300,000 years ago, and later spread around the world. The researchers studied the baby’s genome and genetic data covering other populations to unravel how and when t...
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