Analysis of ten Eurasian individuals, up to 7,500 years old, gives a new picture of movement across continents
Brian Handwerk
Science Correspondent
January 12, 2023
Whether by walking a land bridge or traveling by boat, hunter-gatherers ventured out from eastern Eurasia some 20,000 to 30,000 years ago to become the first Americans. But the intercontinental journey wasn’t a one-way trip. Several times in history, genetic studies show, Native Americans returned across the Bering Strait to Eurasia—long before Europeans began arriving in distant parts of the Americas.
Now, new genetic research is mapping out those ancient migrations back and forth across the Bering Strait and elsewhere across Eurasia during key periods of human prehistory. Scientists have recently recovered ancient DNA from the well-preserved bones and teeth of ten eastern Eurasian individuals, from 7,500 to 500 years old, and they published their findings on Thursday in
Current Biology. The new evidence helps show that from the coasts of America and Japan to the Siberian interior, some of our deep ancestors’ populations may have been more mobile and intermixed than anyone would have imagined.
Whether by walking a land bridge or traveling by boat, hunter-gatherers ventured out from eastern Eurasia some 20,000 to 30,000 years ago to become the first Americans. But the intercontinental journey wasn’t a one-way trip. Several times in history, genetic studies show, Native Americans returned across the Bering Strait to Eurasia—long before Europeans began arriving in distant parts of the Americas.
Now, new genetic research is mapping out those ancient migrations back and forth across the Bering Strait and elsewhere across Eurasia during key periods of human prehistory. Scientists have recently recovered ancient DNA from the well-preserved bones and teeth of ten eastern Eurasian individuals, from 7,500 to 500 years old, and they published their findings on Thursday in Current Biology. The new evidence helps show that from the coasts of America and Japan to the Siberian interior, some of our deep ancestors’ populations may have been more mobile and intermixed than anyone would have imagined.
Whether by walking a land bridge or traveling by boat, hunter-gatherers ventured out from eastern Eurasia some 20,000 to 30,000 years ago to become the first Americans. But the intercontinental journey wasn’t a one-way trip. Several times in history, genetic studies show, Native Americans returned across the Bering Strait to Eurasia—long before Europeans began arriving in distant parts of the Americas.
Now, new genetic research is mapping out those ancient migrations back and forth across the Bering Strait and elsewhere across Eurasia during key periods of human prehistory. Scientists have recently recovered ancient DNA from the well-preserved bones and teeth of ten eastern Eurasian individuals, from 7,500 to 500 years old, and they published their findings on Thursday in Current Biology. The new evidence helps show that from the coasts of America and Japan to the Siberian interior, some of our deep ancestors’ populations may have been more mobile and intermixed than anyone would have imagined.
Cosimo Posth, an archaeogenetics expert at the University of Tübingen, in Germany, and colleagues described the genomes of ten different individuals who lived in three key regions: Siberia’s Altai Mountains, the Kamchatka Peninsula and other parts of the Russian Far East. Environmental conditions—cold climates at high latitudes—allowed for optimal preservation of DNA that was hundreds to thousands of years old. “In these environments you can find individuals with 70 to 80 percent of human DNA in their bones, comparable to what you’d get if you extracted saliva from you or me,” says Posth. “You can actually generate a genome of the same quality as a modern genome. It’s amazing stuff.”
Analysis of the DNA from those ten individuals provided several key revelations about ancient migrations. First, the broad movements of ancient humans and cultures across Eurasia are evidenced by the discovery of an entirely new population that lived in Siberia’s Altai Mountains. That culture’s descendants, the authors show, were part of lineages that later helped populate both Europe and the Americas. Secondly, individuals of Japan’s Jomon culture, isolated in the archipelago for thousands of years, migrated back to the Asian mainland from which their ancestors came. And finally, Native Americans migrated back into Asia several times over a span of thousands of years.
More:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/ancient-dna-evidence-charts-native-american-migrations-back-across-the-bering-sea-180981435/
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