Traces of mysteriously disappeared prehistoric people have been found in Altai

[Judi Lynn]

3. Ancient Americans Crossed Back into Siberia in a Two-Way Migration, New Evidence Shows

Scientists have long known that ancient people living in Siberia made their way into what is now North America. Mounting DNA evidence suggests migration also happened in the opposite direction

By Freda Kreier on January 12, 2023



The sun rises over the Continental Divide in Bering Land Bridge National Preserve in Arctic Alaska. Credit: Natural History Library/Alamy Stock Photo
Science has long known that people living in what is now Siberia once walked (and later paddled boats) across the Being Strait into North America. But new evidence now shows that these early migrations weren’t one-way trips: in a study published on Thursday in Current Biology, researchers say they have uncovered traces of Native American ancestry in the DNA of Siberians who lived centuries ago.

This American heritage—still present in the genomes of some Siberians today—adds to a scattering of archeological evidence suggesting that North Americans were in contact with their northern Asian neighbors for thousands of years before Europeans arrived.

The discovery is not wholly unexpected. “Human movement is rarely unidirectional,” says the new study’s co-author Cosimo Posth, an archaeogeneticist at the University of Tübingen in Germany. “There is usually some back and forth.”

Exactly when and how people first arrived in the Americas is one of the longstanding debates in archaeology. Hypothesized dates vary widely, but many researchers agree that the earliest migrants likely traveled across the Bering Land Bridge, a strip of land that periodically connected northern Asia to modern-day Alaska in prehistory. This transcontinental highway succumbed to rising sea levels sometime between 11,000 and 10,000 years ago, but that didn’t stop migrations between the landmasses. Genetic studies and archaeological digs indicate that people from Siberia made the move into North America several more times, including as recently as 1,000 years ago.

More:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-americans-crossed-back-into-siberia-in-a-two-way-migration-new-evidence-shows/