Researchers have found answers to a long-running question: “When did humans get to the Americas and how?”
The researchers said they came to this after analyzing a DNA sample taken from the skull of a six-week-old baby whose remains, dating back about 11,500 years, were exhumed from a burial site in the US state of Alaska.
The scientists said the study of the girl’s genome revealed only one migration to the Americas via a land bridge that crossed the Bering Strait and reached Siberia and Alaska during the Ice Age.
The baby, named “The Sunshine Girl”, belongs to an indigenous American population that has never been known and descended from these immigrants, the researchers said.
“The study presents the first direct genetic evidence to show that all Native Americans return to the same population at the end of the Ice Age,” said Ben Potter, an archaeologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
The modern man originated in the African continent about 300,000 years ago and spread to the rest of the world.
The researchers studied the baby’s genome and genetic data covering other populations to determine how and when humans reached the Americas.
A group of Native American ancestors separated from East Asian residents about 36,000 years ago and thousands of years later crossed the land bridge, and the group was divided into two breeds some 20,000 years ago, the researchers said.
The first strain traveled south on ice, which covered most of North America between 20 and 15,000 years ago and spread in North and South America and became the ancestors of the Native American population known today.
The second division is the recently known population group known as the “Old Bering Sons” of whom the infant girl descends. In the end, this population group disappeared, where it is likely to have melted into another population that settled in Alaska later.
Scientists have put forward hypotheses in the past talked about multiple waves of migration across the land bridge dating back 14 thousand years ago.
