Thanks to a variety of archaeological finds of tools and animal bones bearing cut marks, together with precise dating, it now seems clear that the Americas began to be colonised as early as the Last Glacial Maximum from tangible evidence from Bluefish Cave in the Yukon territory of Canada and as early as 15.5 ka close to the southern tip of South America in Chile. Although confirmation remains to be found, there is even a possibility that pre-sapiens people had arrived far earlier. Advances in analysis of ancient genetic material help understand the divergence of early colonisers. Y-chromosome DNA from living indigenous men suggests that all early Americans stemmed from 4 separate colonising populations who may have entered by crossing the Beringia land bridge, exposed as a result of glacial fall in global sea level, to follow different routes, including along the Pacific coast. A possible common ancestor of all native Americans emerged in 2013 from the mitochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA of the skeleton of a young man from near Lake Baikal in Siberia who lived about 24 ka ago. At the very start of 2018 an online paper in Nature took the story even further.
The remains of a ~6-week-old girl recovered from a site at Upward Sun River in Alaska – called ‘Xach’itee’aanenh t’eede gay’, or ‘sunrise girl-child’ by indigenous Alaskans – dated at 11.5 ka, has yielded a precise genome (Moreno-Mayar, J. and 17 others 2018. Terminal Pleistocene Alaskan genome reveals first founding population of Native Americans. Nature; doi:10.1038/nature25173). The baby girl’s DNA shows that the group to which she belonged was ancestral to contemporary and fossilised ancient Native Americans. She was probably a member of a founding population of ‘Beringians’. At the end of the last glacial epoch (11.5 ka) a separate branch of Native Americans was already established in unglaciated North America further south. That group had split into two further groups sometime between 17.5 to 14.6 ka, who became ancestors of most of the indigenous people of the Americas. The ‘Beringian’ people were therefore probably stranded in the far north by the difficulties of crossing the vast North American ice sheet. Probing deeper into time, using demographic modelling, suggests that the founding population of all Native Americans, including the ‘Beringians’, split from East Asians around 36 ka ago. Gene flow among them and with East Asians persisted until about 25 thousand years ago, with some admixture with ancient northern Eurasians up to 20 ka. It seems that the ‘Beringians’, of whom little ‘sunrise girl-child’ was a late member, became isolated genetically between 22-18 ka.
The ancestral mixture of both East Asian and northern Eurasians that led to the founders of the whole panoply of geographically isolated Native Americans is remarkable. It shows just how far human groups moved and mingled during the run-up to the Last Glacial Maximum, which made the far north just about uninhabitable – or so it has been assumed. For a small ethnically mixed group to survive such conditions for so long suggests considerable ingenuity in living off the land.
Related articles
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-42555577
Earth-logs 