Alaskan infant's DNA tells story of 'first Americans'
Related: Terminal Pleistocene Alaskan genome reveals first founding population of Native Americans (Nature)
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Source: BBC
Alaskan infant's DNA tells story of 'first Americans'
By Jonathan Amos
BBC Science Correspondent
3 January 2017
The 11,500-year-old remains of an infant girl from Alaska have shed new light on the peopling of the Americas.
Genetic analysis of the child, allied to other data, indicates she belonged to a previously unknown, ancient group.
Scientists say what they have learnt from her DNA strongly supports the idea that a single wave of migrants moved into the continent from Siberia just over 20,000 years ago.
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"These are the oldest human remains ever found in Alaska, but what is particularly interesting here is that this individual belonged to a population of humans that we have never seen before," explained Prof Willerslev, who is affiliated to the universities of Copenhagen and Cambridge.
"It's a population that is most closely related to modern Native Americans but is still distantly related to them. So, you can say she comes from the earliest, or most original, Native American group - the first Native American group that diversified.
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Read more: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-42555577
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Source: New York Times
In the Bones of a Buried Child, Signs of a Massive Human Migration to the Americas
Carl Zimmer
MATTER JAN. 3, 2018
The girl was just six weeks old when she died. Her body was buried on a bed of antler points and red ocher, and she lay undisturbed for 11,500 years.
Archaeologists discovered her in an ancient burial pit in Alaska in 2010, and on Wednesday an international team of scientists reported they had retrieved the child’s genome from her remains. The second-oldest human genome ever found in North America, it sheds new light on how people — among them the ancestors of living Native Americans — first arrived in the Western Hemisphere.
The analysis, published in the journal Nature, shows that the child belonged to a hitherto unknown human lineage, a group that split off from other Native Americans just after — or perhaps just before — they arrived in North America.
“It’s the earliest branch in the Americas that we know of so far,” said Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen, a co-author of the new study. As far as he and other scientists can tell, these early settlers endured for thousands of years before disappearing.
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Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/03/science/native-americans-beringia-siberia.html
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