“Unearthed Secrets: How an Ancient Siberian Tribe Holds the Key to the Origins of Modern Native Americans”
Both newly-discovered populations have been hailed “a significant part of human history.”
The study was published in the journal Nature and was led by an international team of scientists. Geneticists Martin Sikora and Eske Willerslev were able to glean crucial information about one previously unknown population from just the two baby teeth that were uncovered in a site in Northeastern Siberia known as Yana.
The site was found in 2001 and features more than 2,500 artifacts of animal bones and ivory together with stone tools and other proof of early human habitation. The newly discovered group has since been dubbed — fittingly — the Ancient North Siberians.
The 31,000-year-old baby teeth come from two separate boys who once belonged to a group of some 40 Ancient North Siberians, though it is believed that the total population was about 500. More astounding still, the DNA showed no evidence of inbreeding which was fairly common amongst other ancient peoples of this era.
The discovery of this population has since changed what researchers previously knew about the migration dynamics of ancient populations in and around this region.
“They diversified almost at the same time as the ancestors of modern-day Asians and Europeans and it’s likely that at one point they occupied large regions of the northern hemisphere,” Willerslev, who sits as the director of The Lundbeck Foundation Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen, told Science Daily.
Interestingly, most of the lineage of the two boys can be traced back to the early migration out of Africa and specifically to the people who would eventually spread out into Europe about 200,000 years ago. However, scientists could not find a match between the Yana boys’ ancestry to any living people which suggests that their population has since died out.
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