National Post (National Edition)
INFANT REMAINS OFFER CLUES TO MIGRATION ROUTES.
DNA ANALYSIS OF TWO INFANTS FROM 11,500 YEARS AGO SHOWS LINKS TO ASIA, INDIGENOUS NORTH AMERICA
The discovery of two infants, ceremonially buried by a previously unknown population of ancient humans in Alaska around 11,500 years ago, offers stunning new clarity to the story of how humans came to inhabit the Americas, according to a new scientific paper.
By confirming the theory that Indigenous Americans are descended from Asians, the find also threatens to inflame a cultural controversy that has long troubled the study of human origins in the New World.
These Ancient Beringians — named for the Bering Land Bridge that once connected North America to Asia — were a “sister” population, or clade, that shared recent common ancestors with modern Indigenous North and South Americans, according to an author of the report in the journal Nature that describes the discovery at Upward Sun River in central Alaska.
A comparative study of the infants’ DNA indicates these people separated from a population in eastern Asia, and remained isolated for thousands of years before migrating into Alaska, sometime after 15,000 years ago. Their tool technology also shows clear links to Asian groups, according to Ben Potter, an anthropological archeologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
It is not clear what became of the Ancient Beringians, whether they died out on their own, as many other human populations have done in the ages since humans became anatomically modern in Africa and started spreading into Asia and Europe, or whether they were absorbed into the population of other Native Americans, or even whether they were killed off in conflict.
But this first genetic analysis of the oldest human remains on the American side of Beringia makes clear that both Ancient Beringians and all Native Americans “descended from a single founding population that initially split from East Asians around 36 (thousand years ago), with gene flow persisting until around 25 (thousand years ago),” the paper concludes.
Both the human remains at Upward Sun River and modern Native Americans “derived from the same ancestral source, which carried a mixture of East Asian and Mal’ta related ancestry.” (Mal’ta refers to an ancient population near Lake Baikal in modern Siberia, known largely from the remains of a four-year-old boy who died around 24,000 years ago.)
The Alaska study offers “direct genomic evidence that all Native Americans can be traced back to the same source population from a single Late Pleistocene founding event,” the paper claims. The infants, likely cousins, have been named by the local Indigenous community as Xach’itee’aanenh T’eede Gaay (sunrise girl-child) and Yełkaanenh T’eede Gaay (dawn twilight girl-child).
The last year has illustrated the cultural unease over the North American human origin story, and the panics than can arise as scientific theory progresses, first via archeology, more recently by genetics.
Kennewick Man, for example, a set of human remains found in 1996 in Washington state and dated to around 9,000 years ago, was finally buried this year after his case slipped the bonds of academic science to be fought in American civil courts. At issue was whether Native American tribes of the area could use a federal law to reclaim the remains and prevent further study of them. Although Kennewick Man has recently been shown by DNA to be Native American, researchers had initially claimed he appeared “Caucasoid” or Polynesian, which was taken as undermining the belief of Native Americans that their ancestors were present on this land since time immemorial.
That same belief was at the centre of a Canadian scandal this summer, when former governor-general David Johnston told an interviewer: “We’re a country based on immigration, going right back to our, quote, Indigenous people, unquote, who were immigrants as well, 10, 12, 14,000 years ago.” He later said he misspoke and clarified that Indigenous people were the original inhabitants of North America.
His dates were not wildly far off the best scientific estimates, but the modern political term “immigrant” touched a cultural nerve. A few weeks later, when a research paper suggested a key ice corridor in northwestern North America was not passable at the relevant time, there was a spate of reports claiming the whole theory that Indigenous North Americans ultimately came from Asia was itself a racist, colonial myth.
The danger, as the historian Alan MacEachern described it in an essay at the time, was that people were mistaking revision for revisionism. Efforts to improve a theory by criticizing it were being taken as grounds to dismiss it entirely.
In an interview, Potter said the Upper Sun River discovery makes the American human origin story more accurate but more complex.
“What we do when we look at the current data is we look at the patterns, and right now we have hundreds of sites that form a very distinctive pattern of slow expansion from southern Siberia to northern Siberia, into Alaska, and further south,” he said. “It confirms itself by these multiple lines of evidence.”