Models of gene flow from Aisa to the Americas, like this one from a 2007 PLOS ONE paper, may need to be reconsidered.WIKIMEDIA, ERIKA TAMM ET AL.Native Americans may not have descended from East Asians who crossed the Bering Land Bridge more than 15,000 years ago, according to a new genomic analysis of a millennia-old Siberian skeleton. A portion of the nuclear DNA recovered from the upper arm bone of a 4-year-old boy that was buried near the Siberian village of Mal’ta about 24,000 years ago is shared by modern Native Americans and no other group. But the boy appears to have been descended from people of European or western Asian origin.
Eske Willerslev, a University of Copenhagen ancient DNA expert, announced the findings last week at the Paleoamerican Odyssey conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the resulting manuscript is in press at Nature. In addition to finding genome regions shared by modern Native Americans, he and collaborator Kelly Graf of Texas A&M University found that the boy’s Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA belonged to haplogroups that are found almost exclusively in Europeans and people living in Asia west of the Altai Mountains.
Conspicuously absent from the child’s DNA, however, was any connection to modern East Asians, a genetic relationship present in the genomes of virtually all Native Americans. This means that the population from which the boy came must have included ancestors of modern Native ...
