Two children’s\nmilk teeth buried deep in a remote archaeological site in north eastern Siberia\nhave revealed a previously unknown group of people lived there during the last\nIce Age. The finding was part of a wider study which also\ndiscovered 10,000 year-old human remains in another site in Siberia are\ngenetically related to Native Americans\u2014the first time such close genetic links\nhave been discovered outside of the US.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The international team of\nscientists, led by Professor Eske Willerslev who holds positions at St John’s\nCollege, University of Cambridge, and is director of The Lundbeck Foundation\nCentre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen, have named the new\npeople group the ‘Ancient North Siberians’ and described their existence as ‘a\nsignificant part of human history’.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The DNA was recovered\nfrom the only human remains discovered from the era\u2014two tiny milk teeth\u2014that\nwere found in a large archaeological site found in Russia near the Yana River.\nThe site, known as Yana Rhinoceros Horn Site (RHS), was found in 2001 and\nfeatures more than 2,500 artefacts of animal bones and ivory along with stone\ntools and evidence of human habitation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The discovery is\npublished today (June 5 2019) as part of a wider study in Nature<\/em> and\nshows the Ancient North Siberians endured extreme conditions in the region\n31,000 years ago and survived by hunting woolly mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses,\nand bison.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Professor Willerslev\nsaid: “These people were a significant part of human history, they\ndiversified almost at the same time as the ancestors of modern day Asians and\nEuropeans and it’s likely that at one point they occupied large regions of the\nnorthern hemisphere.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Dr. Martin Sikora, of The\nLundbeck Foundation Centre for GeoGenetics and first author of the study,\nadded: “They adapted to extreme environments very quickly, and were highly\nmobile. These findings have changed a lot of what we thought we knew about the\npopulation history of north eastern Siberia but also what we know about the\nhistory of human migration as a whole.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Researchers estimate that the\u00a0population numbers\u00a0at the site would have been around 40 people with a wider population of around 500. Genetic analysis of the\u00a0milk teeth\u00a0revealed the two individuals sequenced showed no evidence of inbreeding which was occurring in the declining Neanderthal populations at the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The complex population\ndynamics during this period and genetic comparisons to other people groups,\nboth ancient and recent, are documented as part of the wider study which\nanalysed 34 samples of human genomes found in ancient archaeological sites\nacross northern Siberia and central Russia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Professor Laurent\nExcoffier from the University of Bern, Switzerland, said: “Remarkably, the\nAncient North Siberians people are more closely related to Europeans than\nAsians and seem to have migrated all the way from Western Eurasia soon after\nthe divergence between Europeans and Asians.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Scientists found the Ancient\nNorth Siberians generated the mosaic genetic make-up of contemporary people who\ninhabit a vast area across northern Eurasia and the Americas\u2014providing the\n‘missing link’ of understanding the genetics of Native American ancestry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is widely accepted that\nhumans first made their way to the Americas from Siberia into Alaska via a land\nbridge spanning the Bering Strait which was submerged at the end of the last\nIce Age. The researchers were able to pinpoint some of these ancestors as Asian\npeople groups who mixed with the Ancient North Siberians.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Professor David Meltzer,\nSouthern Methodist University, Dallas, one of the paper’s authors, explained:\n“We gained important insight into population isolation and admixture that\ntook place during the depths of the Last Glacial Maximum\u2014the coldest and\nharshest time of the Ice Age\u2014and ultimately the ancestry of the peoples who\nwould emerge from that time as the ancestors of the indigenous people of the\nAmericas.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n This discovery was based\non the DNA analysis of a 10,000 year-old male remains found at a site near the\nKolyma River in Siberia. The individual derives his ancestry from a mixture of\nAncient North Siberian DNA and East Asian DNA, which is very similar to that\nfound in Native Americans. It is the first time human remains this closely\nrelated to the Native American populations have been discovered outside of the\nUS.\n\nProfessor Willerslev added: “The remains are genetically very close\nto the ancestors of Paleo-Siberian speakers and close to the ancestors of\nNative Americans. It is an important piece in the puzzle of understanding the\nancestry of Native Americans as you can see the Kolyma signature in the Native\nAmericans and Paleo-Siberians. This individual is the missing link of Native\nAmerican ancestry.”\n\n\n\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Two children’s milk teeth buried deep in a remote archaeological site in north eastern Siberia have revealed a previously unknown group of people lived there during the last Ice Age. The finding was part of a wider study which also discovered 10,000 year-old human remains in another site in Siberia are genetically related to Native […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":2058,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-2057","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-current-affairs-articles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gkseries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gkseries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gkseries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gkseries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gkseries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2057"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.gkseries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2057\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3350,"href":"https:\/\/www.gkseries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2057\/revisions\/3350"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gkseries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gkseries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gkseries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gkseries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2057"},{"taxonomy":"offerexpiration","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gkseries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/offerexpiration?post=2057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}