Boy from ancient grave related to aboriginals
Find confirms Asian ancestry of the first North Americans
The child was covered in red ochre 12,600 years ago and buried with a trove of stone and bone tools on a grassy hillside in Montana.
He’s now being held up as proof that most of today’s Native Americans are descendants of the first people to settle successfully in the Americas.
“It’s almost like a missing link,” says researcher Eske Willerslev, of the University of Copenhagen, in Denmark, who headed the international team that laid bare the child’s genome on Wednesday in the journal Nature.
He and his colleagues say it not only confirms the Asian ancestry of the first North Americans but also reveals the boy is related to most Native Americans today.
The boy, who was just over a year old when he died of unknown causes, was buried near a rocky outcropping in Montana on land that is now owned by the Anzick family, for whom the boy is named. The burial site was unearthed by a construction crew in 1968 and has intrigued archeologists ever since.
More than 100 distinctive stone and elk bone tools and objects found with the boy show he belonged to the Clovis people, hunter gatherers who roamed North America 12,600 to 13,000 years ago. It is the only Clovis burial site ever found.
The origins and genetic legacy of the Clovis people has been debated for years, with most scientists arguing they descended from ancient people who migrated to North America from Asia via Siberia along the Pacific coast. But some have suggested that the Clovis predecessors may have come from Europe — a theory the boy’s genome disproves.
And Willerslev’s “very, very rough estimate” is that Anzick boy is “directly ancestral” to as many as 80 per cent of Native Americans today. “Some are directly descendent … others are almost cousins,” he said.
“In fact, Anzick is closer related to all Native Americans, including those from Canada, than to anybody else in the world,” Willerslev told Postmedia News.
Co-author Michael Waters, of Texas A&M University, said the genetic findings fit well with archeological data that indicates the American continent was first explored and settled by people who migrated from Asia about 15,000 years ago, with the Clovis people emerging about 13,000 years ago.
The genetic relatedness between the Anzick boy and most modern Native Americans indicates a “single migration” introduced the majority of the founding populations of the Americas south of the ice sheets at the close of the last ice age, Waters said. These early people then fanned out across North, Central and South America.
The boy’s genome also adds to the larger story of disper- sal of modern humans who originated in Africa about 50,000 years ago and spread rapidly over Europe and Asia before making their way to America. “In essence, the Anzick boy tells us about the epic journey of our species,” Waters said.
Archeologist Michael Richards at the University of B.C. agrees.
“This demonstrates a genetic continuity between those people that first arrived in North America and modern Native Americans,” said Richards, noting that there have been arguments, especially related to the ancient Kennewick man found in Washington State, that some early skeletons were not necessarily related to recent and living Native Americans.
“This study shows that this is very unlikely, and these early Clovis people are indeed their direct ancestors,” said Richards, with the caveat that more study on DNA of early skeletons will help “definitively” show this.
For native people, the findings confirm what many have long believed.
“I feel like this discovery basically confirms what tribes have never really doubted — that we have been here since time immemorial and that all the artifacts and objects in the ground are remnants of our direct ancestors,” said Shane Doyle, a Crow tribal member and professor of Native American studies at Montana State University.
Doyle said native people’s dealings with Willerslev’s team has been “positive” and signals what they hope will be a new co-operative era of research involving Native Americans, who need to be “equal partners” in the work.
Willerslev met with tribal people to discuss the findings. And rather than keeping the boy “in a box” on a shelf, Doyle says the scientists are making arrangements with Native Americans to rebury the boy by this summer.