The 24,000 year old remains of a boy found near Lake Baikal in Siberia have cast new light on the genetic origins of the earliest human inhabitants of the Americas:
A Texas A&M TAMU Times report notes that a DNA study of skeletal remains believed to be that of a young boy who lived and died about 24,000 years ago in Siberia, could turn the archaeological world on its head. DNA sequencing of the ancient child’s genome shows that while up to one-third of his ancestry can be traced back to Europe, nearly 30 percent of modern Native Americans’ ancestry also came from this youngster’s gene pool. Which suggests that First Americans came directly from Siberia, according to a research team that includes Dr. Kelly Graf, an assistant professor in the Center for the Study of First Americans and Department of Anthropology at Texas A&M.
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A Science magazine article by science writer Ed Jong, entitled “America’s natives have European roots,†reports that the palaeolithic era skeleton, along with flint tools, a beaded necklace and what appears to be pendant-like items, all apparently placed in the burial as “grave goods,†first discovered in the late 1920s near the village of Mal’ta near Lake Baikal in south-central Siberia, and excavated by Russian archaeologists over a 20-year period ending in 1958 †The remains, since then referred to as “the Mal’ta child,†add a new root to the family tree of indigenous Americans. While some of the New World’s native ancestry clearly traces back to east Asia, sequencing of the 3 to 4 year old Mal’ta boy’s genome — the oldest known of any modern human — reveals that up to one-third of that ancestry can also be traced back to Europe.
I find this report very interesting in the context of so-called “Kennewick Man”. As you may recall, that’s the name given to the 8,000 year old remains of a man found on on federal lands around 15 years ago that resulted in so much controversy and, eventually, a law suit that made it all the way to the 9th Circuit. The remains, anatomically quite different from modern indigenous peoples in the area, have been found to have some notable similarities to Europeans.
That this boy who lived so long ago in the remotes of central Siberia, whose genome shared much with indigenous American people but also with European people, as does “Kennewick Man”, tells a new story on the human settling of the Americas.
As you study the history of human settlement if there’s one thing that’s clear it’s that the settlement patterns, who lived where, 500 years ago were dramatically different from those of today. The settlement patterns 2,000 or 5,000 or 10,000 years ago were just that much more different.
We’re all from somewhere else. But we’re here now. We should just learn to deal with that on a day-forward basis.
