“Unraveling the Secrets of ‘Spirit Cave Man’: What Ancient DNA Reveals About Earth’s Oldest Mummy!”
“What became very clear to me was that this was a deeply emotional and deeply cultural event,” Willerslev explained. “The tribe have real feelings for Spirit Cave, which as a European it can be hard to understand but for us it would very much be like burying our mother, father, sister or brother.”
“We can all imagine what it would be like if our father or mother was put in an exhibition and they had that same feeling for Spirit Cave. It has been a privilege to work with them,” he added.
In addition to ending this 20-year battle, this study also dismisses a longstanding theory called the Paleoamerican hypothesis which claimed that a group called Paleoamericans roamed North America before the Native Americans.
Natural History Museum of DenmarkSkulls and other human remains belonging to the group of people found at Lagoa Santa in Brazil.
As a part of the study, the researchers sequenced the genomes of other controversial ancient remains from North and South America. They examined the 10,400-year-old remains found at Lagoa Santa in Brazil and found that they were Native Americans as well and not Paleoamericans. Previous studies on their cranial morphology theorized that they couldn’t be Native Americans because their skulls were different shapes.
Their studies of the Spirit Cave Mummy and the Lagoa Santa skeletons have revealed groundbreaking new information on how ancient humans moved and settled across North and South America as well.
“A striking thing about the analysis of Spirit Cave and Lagoa Santa is their close genetic similarity which implies their ancestral population traveled through the continent at astonishing speed,” Dr. David Meltzer, from the Department of Anthropology, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, said in the statement. “They had a whole continent to themselves and they were traveling great distances at breathtaking speed.”
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