Science has long known that people living in what is now Siberia once walked (and later rowed) across the Strait of Being to North America. But new evidence shows that these early migrations weren’t one-way. biology todayresearchers say they have found traces of Native American ancestry in the DNA of Siberians who lived centuries ago.
This American legacy remains today in some Siberian genomes, with archaeological evidence suggesting that North Americans were in contact with their North Asian neighbors thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans. Evidence is scattered.
This discovery is not entirely unexpected. “Human movement is rarely one-way,” says Cosimo Posth, a co-author of the new study and an archaeological geneticist at the university. Germany’s Tübingen. “Usually there is some back and forth.”
Exactly when and how people first arrived in the Americas is one of the longstanding debates in archaeology. Hypothetical dates vary widely, but many researchers believe they likely crossed the Bering Land Bridge, a strip of land that regularly connected northern Asia and modern-day Alaska in prehistoric times. of researchers agree. This transcontinental highway succumbed to sea level rise sometime between 11,000 and 10,000 years ago, but intercontinental migration did not stop. Genetic studies and archaeological excavations indicate that the Siberian man migrated to North America several more times, and most recently he did so 1,000 years ago.
But despite much research focusing on reconstructing human arrivals in present-day Alaska, “little is known about migration in other directions,” says Poss. increase.
That is starting to change little by little. A 2019 study found genetic evidence that ancient peoples who lived on opposite sides of the Bering Strait were in contact with each other. A small number of archaeological finds in Alaska indicate an ongoing trade between North America and the rest of the world.
However, it is unclear how far these relationships are strait. Little is known about how people moved within Siberia in the past few thousand years. Hoping to reconstruct this part of the region’s history, Poss and his colleagues sequenced his DNA from 10 of his ancient people whose bodies were unearthed at various locations around Siberia. bottom.
The oldest of these samples is 7,500 years old. The study also included the genomes of three of his, who lived on the Kamchatka Peninsula, which hung from the Russian Far East to the southwest of the Bering Strait just 500 years ago. These sequences are the first ancient DNA samples to emerge from the remote peninsula, says Posth.
Siberia was once a hotbed of migration, and researchers have discovered that ancient Siberians were in contact with people as far away as Japan and Greenland. Their analysis also revealed a previously unknown connection between the Native Americans and the people who lived in Kamchatka centuries ago. The team found that these Kamchatka ancestors met North Americans on at least two occasions. These connections indicate a more inland Native American influence than previous studies.
Poss said he expected to find evidence of Native American contact in Siberia, but was surprised how long ago these run-ins had taken place. These ancient encounters weren’t the last time Kamchatka people interacted with North Americans. The team found an even higher proportion of native He-American DNA in the modern Kamchatka genome. This suggests that the people of the peninsula also had contact with North Americans over the past few centuries.
Posth says it remains unclear how the DNA from North America entered the Kamchatka peninsula. The Kamchatka man’s ancestry may have inherited his DNA from other Siberians inheriting this heritage, or may have been in contact with his native Americans themselves. Still, Postos and his colleagues’ work builds on previous genetic research by showing that DNA migrated from North America to Siberia, said Dennis O’Rourke, an anthropological geneticist at the University of Kansas. He is not involved in the new paper.
Anthropological geneticist Anne Stone of Arizona State University says the fact that people in North Asia and North America made contact isn’t all that surprising given how close the two landmasses are to each other. . new research. For one thing, the Aleutian Islands (where the Aleut people historically hunted and traded) form a chain that begins just off the coast of southwestern Alaska and extends west to point directly at Kamchatka.
As for the Bering Strait, Stone says that while the region’s early inhabitants may have been isolated from each other after the Bering Land Bridge disappeared, later generations were less restricted. ,” says Stone. “So they were able to visit and trade with each other.”
