A&M study of 24,000-year-old bones finds Native Americans' European ancestry

[Judi Lynn]

A&M study of 24,000-year-old bones finds Native Americans' European ancestry
By Carol Christian | November 21, 2013

Cutting-edge analysis of a young boy's 24,000-year-old bones suggests that the first Americans came directly from Siberia, according to a research team that includes a Texas A&M University professor.

Kelly Graf, assistant professor at A&M's Center for the Study of First Americans and Department of Anthropology, is part of an international team studying a young boy's skeletal remains believed to be 24,000 years old.

Results so far show that nearly 30 percent of modern Native Americans' ancestry came from this boy's gene pool, meaning Native Americans have more European genetic influence than previously thought, an A&M news release said.

The research team is led by Eske Willerslev and Maanasa Raghaven from the Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark and includes researchers from Sweden, Russia, United Kingdom, University of Chicago and University of California-Berkeley.

More:
http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/A-M-study-of-24-000-year-old-bones-finds-Native-4998581.php?cmpid=hpts

[Judi Lynn]

1. Ancient bones point to Native Americans’ twin ancestry

Ancient bones point to Native Americans’ twin ancestry
AFP-JIJI
Nov 21, 2013

PARIS – In the “Out of Africa” theory, Homo sapiens left their ancestral home in East Africa around 50,000 years ago, heading north, west and south.

Their East Asian descendants eventually crossed from Siberia to Alaska, island-hopping across the frozen Bering Strait, around 15,000 years ago.

Thus began human settlement of modern-day North America, according to this thinking.
But a new study suggests this human odyssey is rather more complex, and just as compelling.

Against all expectations, DNA teased from the bones of a child who lived in Siberia 24,000 years ago shows that the forerunners of Native Americans can also be traced to western Eurasia, or on the western boundaries of Asia.

The evidence comes from “MA-1,” whose bones were found in Mal’ta in south-central Siberia in the 1920s and are today stored at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia.

A tiny sample of DNA — just 0.15 gram — from the mitochondria and nucleus of cells found the signatures of dual ancestry: one relating to modern-day East Asians and the other to modern-day West Eurasians.

More:
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2013/11/21/world/ancient-bones-point-to-native-americans-twin-ancestry/#.Uo-_nurnb_Q

[Judi Lynn]

2. 24,000-Year-Old Body Shows Kinship to Europeans and American Indians

24,000-Year-Old Body Shows Kinship to Europeans and American Indians



By NICHOLAS WADE
Published: November 20, 2013

The genome of a young boy buried at Mal’ta near Lake Baikal in eastern Siberia some 24,000 years ago has turned out to hold two surprises for anthropologists.

The first is that the boy’s DNA matches that of Western Europeans, showing that during the last Ice Age people from Europe had reached farther east across Eurasia than previously supposed. Though none of the Mal’ta boy’s skin or hair survives, his genes suggest he would have had brown hair, brown eyes and freckled skin.

The second surprise is that his DNA also matches a large proportion — about 25 percent — of the DNA of living Native Americans. The first people to arrive in the Americas have long been assumed to have descended from Siberian populations related to East Asians. It now seems that they may be a mixture between the Western Europeans who had reached Siberia and an East Asian population.

The Mal’ta boy was 3 to 4 years old and was buried under a stone slab wearing an ivory diadem, a bead necklace and a bird-shaped pendant. Elsewhere at the same site about 30 Venus figurines were found of the kind produced by the Upper Paleolithic cultures of Europe. The remains were excavated by Russian archaeologists over a 20-year period ending in 1958 and stored in museums in St. Petersburg.

More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/21/science/two-surprises-in-dna-of-boy-found-buried-in-siberia.html?=&_r=0

[Coyotl]

3. more:

http://www.heritagedaily.com/2013/11/skeleton-in-siberia-raises-new-questions-about-first-americans/100109

“Our study proves that Native Americans ancestors migrated to the Americas from Siberia and not directly from Europe as some have recently suggested,” Graf explains.