MONTANA BOY PROVIDES GENETIC PROOF OF RECENT MIGRATIONS
Now a team of scientists led by the Danish geneticist Eske Willerslev has analyzed the boy’s [Clovis-era, found in Montana] origins and discovered that he descends from a Siberian tribe with roots tracing back to Europe. Some of the boy’s ancestors are likely even to have lived in present-day Germany.
Their findings go even further: More than 80 percent of all native peoples in the Americas — from the Alaska’s Aleuts to the Maya of Yucatan to the Aymaras along the Andes — are descended from Montana boy’s lineage.
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.
When researchers analyzed the Anzick child’s DNA and compared it to the genomes of living Native Americans, they found that the boy’s family members were the ancestors of multiple Central and South American groups, such as the Maya of Central America and the Karitiana people of Brazil. Willerslev estimates that roughly 80% of Native Americans are descended from the Anzick group, contradicting claims by other scholars that the Clovis people didn’t leave much of a genetic legacy.
Selected quotes from article published here:
Hālau 'Aha Hui Lānākila 