Oldest Known Cousin Of Native Americans Found In Russia.
It’s kind of hard to believe that we might have come from somewhere else but considering many indigenous tribes of the past lived nomadic live’s, constantly traveling and not staying in one place it might be possible we did cross over the bearing straight.
All of this is up to speculation but one thing is for certain is that we were for sure the first people in North America.
A new study has revealed the oldest link yet between Native Americans and their ancestors in East Asia: a 14,000-year-old tooth belonging to a close cousin of today’s Native Americans found thousands of kilometers from the landmass that once connected Eurasia and the Americas.
Jennifer Raff, a geneticist at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, who studies the peopling of the Americas suggests the Siberian ancestors of North America’s Indigenous peoples were more widespread and mobile than previously thought.
She says that it may also support the hypothesis that Native Americans’ ancestors became isolated from their Asian forebears on Beringia (Bering Strait), an ancient land bridge that connected Siberia to Alaska.
About 20,000 years ago, ancient tribes began to cross the eastern tip of Siberia onto Beringia. Exactly where they lived and roamed in Siberia before that is still a mystery.
Old Tooth Found.
Being much farther from the Bering Strait than many would have suspected In the 1970s, Russian archaeologists excavated a site called Ust-Kyakhta. Which is between the southern banks of Lake Baikal and the Mongolian border in south-central Russia. They recovered thousands of stones, bones tools, ceramics, reindeer bones, fish bones, and a sliver of a human tooth.
The tooth however sat in a collections drawer for decades, until a woman named Svetlana Shnaider who is an archaeologist at the Russian Academy of Sciences, brought it to the attention of ancient DNA experts at MPI.
At first, she was initially quite skeptical that it could still contain DNA, But due to Siberia’s cold and dry environment would prove to be the perfect condition for the preservation of DNA.
The team succeeded in sequencing the tooth bearer’s genome from the dental pulp from the ancient tooth. Based on the radiocarbon dates of charcoal and bones found alongside the tooth, researchers estimated it to be about 14,000 years old.
The genome also showed the individual was a man who shared the same distinctive mixture of East Asian and Eurasian ancestry as today’s Native Americans.
That makes him the oldest known close relative of Native Americans outside the Americas which is pretty cool.
The man lived 4500 km from the Bering Strait and nearly 3200 km from a woman found in northeastern Siberia who shared about two-thirds of her genome with living Native Americans.
This suggests that the Native Americans once occupied a vast region of northeastern Eurasia which is pretty unbelievable.
That impressive distance implies that the group directly ancestral to Native Americans became more and more different more each other in Beringia and not in Siberia, where they had been moving around for thousands and thousands of years,
Raff says. Today, the people near southern Siberia, Russia have virtually none of the genetic hallmarks of that older population, indicating it was replaced by migrants of mostly northeast Asian ancestry about 10,000 years ago.
The evidence of ancient DNA offers a rare historical window to understanding the origin of Native Americans Asian, and European genetics, Every sample so far from the region has helped to understand the history of Native Americans and the history of humans in general.
Oldest Known Cousin Of Native Americans Found In Russia.
