“Unearthed Secrets: How an Ancient Siberian Tribe Holds the Key to the Origins of Modern Native Americans”
Meanwhile, the fragment of a 9,800-year-old skull from a woman who scientists have since named Kolyma1 for where her remains were found, showed that some part of Kolyma1’s DNA came from the Ancient North Siberians but most of it came from an entirely different population: the Ancient Paleo-Siberians. This suggests that the Ancient North Siberians were genetically overtaken by the Paleo-Siberians.
Even more shocking, the DNA of the Paleo-Siberian woman was discovered to be very similar to the DNA of modern Native Americans. “It’s the closest we have ever gotten to a Native American ancestor outside the Americas,” Willerslev told Science Magazine. In fact, two-thirds of Native American ancestry can be traced to still-unknown peoples.
Jens Astrup/AFP/Getty ImagesProfessor Eske Willerslev speaking during a press conference for an earlier study related to ancient DNA.
The Ancient Paleo-Siberians, much like their 31,000-year-old relatives in the north, were relatively unknown until now because a third population with completely different East Asian heritage cropped up and eventually replaced them. These were the Neo-Siberians and they were the last ancient group to come out of Siberia. They are the ancestors of most living Siberians today.
These are exciting finds even though the gap between modern Native Americans and their ancient ancestors still remains vastly distant. Scientists estimate that the ancestral DNA of current Native Americans broke off from its Siberian lineage roughly 24,000 years ago, which coincides with about the same time that the peopling of the Americas began.
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