New Study Shows Native Americans Mostly Linked To Western European, Not East Asian

A 24,000-year-old Siberian boy has finally been linked to Native Americans. According to RT.com, the boy's body was discovered by Russian archaeologists in the 1920s, lying under a slab of rock, wearing ancient jewelry -- an ivory diadem, a bird-shaped pendant and a bead necklacen-- all of which point to an Upper Paleolithic European culture. In a ground breaking two-decade long DNA study released earlier this week, scientists demonstrates that as "much as 30 percent of this brown-haired, freckled boy’s DNA can be found in modern Native Americans, which suggests that their modern population came directly from Siberia." The anthropological world is stunned by the new study. Here's why:

But having analyzed the so-called nuclear genome, which carries more evidence of our ancestry, he told AFP that "the result came as a complete surprise to us."

Firstly, the boy was from all over Europe: the two examined genomes show that modern Europeans had traveled much father into Eurasia than we had previously assumed.

Kelly Graf, an assistant professor at the Center for the Study of First Americans and Department of Anthropology at Texas A&M, who helped Willersley in his research, told Science Daily that the find “shows he had close genetic ties to today's Native Americans and some western Eurasians… Also, he shared close genetic ties with other Ice-Age western Eurasians living in European Russia, Czech Republic and even Germany. We think these Ice-Age people were quite mobile and capable of maintaining a far-reaching gene pool that extended from central Siberia all the way west to central Europe."

Secondly, the Native American connection was finally found.

"Our study proves that Native Americans’ ancestors migrated to the Americas from Siberia and not directly from Europe as some have recently suggested," Graf said. This sort of intricate and complete DNA mapping of a human is the oldest of its kind ever performed.

However, given the boy’s European-Native-American mix, it was strange that the boy had no connection to modern East Asians. This has led Willersley and his team to suppose that the ancient Native Americans had already broken off ties with the East Asians before interbreeding with the Mal’ta people, to whom the boy belongs.

This population must then have traveled over the frozen Beringian land bridge that used to be between Siberia and Alaska. This consequently resulted in the creation of the modern Native Americans.

[via rt.com]