The cremated remains of a third child, who died at the age of three, were found on top of the hearth at the abandoned camp.Ĭonnie Mulligan, an anthropologist at the University of Florida, said the findings pointed to a single migration of people from Asia to the New World, but said other questions remained. The two babies were found in a burial pit beneath a hearth where families cooked salmon caught in the local river. Excavations at the site, known as Upward Sun River, have revealed at least three tent structures that would have provided shelter. The families who lived at the ancient camp may have spent months there, Potter said. “We have no evidence of people in the Beringia region 20,000 years ago.” “The support for this scenario is pretty strong,” he said. Ben Potter, an archaeologist on the team from the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, suspects that the Beringians split from the ancestors of other Native Americans in Asia before both groups made their way across the land bridge to North America in separate migrations. Those who settled in the north became the isolated ancient Beringians, he said, while those who moved south, around or through the ice sheets, split into the north and south Native Americans about 15,700 years ago.īut there is another possibility. Willerslev believes the ancestors of Native Americans travelled to the continent in a single wave of migration more than 20,000 years ago. About 25,000 years ago, this group mixed and bred with ancient north Eurasians in the region, the descendants of whom went on to become the first Native Americans to settle the New World.ĭuring the last ice age, so much water was locked up in the ice caps that a land bridge reached from Asia to North America across what is now the Bering Strait. Using evolutionary models, the researchers showed that the ancestors of the first Native Americans started to emerge as a distinct population about 35,000 years ago, probably in north-east Asia. The rest of her genetic makeup was a roughly even mix of DNA now carried by the northern and southern Native Americans. They found that nearly half of the girl’s DNA came from the ancient north Eurasians who lived in what is now Siberia.

Working with scientists at the University of Alaska and elsewhere, Willerslev compared the genetic makeup of the baby, named Xach’itee’aanenh t’eede gaay or “sunrise child-girl” by the local community, with genomes from other ancient and modern people. Details of the work are published in Nature. “This is a new population of Native Americans,” said Eske Willerslev, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Copenhagen, whose team recovered the girl’s DNA from a dense part of her skull known as the petrous bone.

While the ancestors of other Native Americans pushed south into the continent as the ice caps thawed, the ancient Beringians remained in the north until they eventually died out. The newly-discovered group, named “ancient Beringians”, appears to have split off from the founding population of Native Americans about 20,000 years ago.

Ice age disco zoo patterns