Were ancient Siberians the ancestors of Native Americans?

Two children’s milk teeth found buried deep in an archaeological site in northeastern Siberia have revealed that the region was inhabited by a previously unknown group of people during the last Ice Age.

Scientists believe that the results of DNA analysis of the remains, discovered at the remote Yana Rhinoceros Horn Site, “could help solve long-standing mysteries about the ancestors of native North Americans”, reports The Guardian.

The history of humans in the vast Russian province runs remarkably deep. “After humans evolved in Africa, they started moving to other continents about 70,000 years ago,” explains The New York Times. By about 45,000 years ago, “humans had reached the northern edge of Siberia, where they hunted mammoths and other big game”, the newspaper continues.

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Until the Yana camp was discovered, it was believed that people had not spread further north into the region until about 13,000 years ago. However, when a research team from the University of Copenhagen carried out DNA tests on the teeth, from two boys, it emerged that the so-called Yana people, now known as Ancient North Siberians, lived there 31,000 years ago.

The milk teeth are the oldest human remains found at these harsh northern latitudes, according to New Scientist.

The Guardian reports that experts had previously suggested “that these remains might be from the ancestors of native North Americans”, but that picture is complicated by the DNA findings - outlined in a newly published study in the journal Nature.

Although it is “commonly believed the ancestors of native North Americans arrived from Eurasia via a now submerged land bridge called Beringia, exactly which groups crossed and gave rise to native North American populations has been difficult to unpick”, the newspaper says.

“The general conception is that the first people getting up there were the ancestors of Native Americans that crossed the Bering Strait and died out,” said Professor Eske Willerslev, who led the team at the Danish university. “What we see now is that this is by no means how it happened.”

The DNA results show that the Ancient North Siberians were genetically distinct from both Western Eurasians and East Asians.

“It’s a people we didn’t know about. They died out. They have left tiny traces of DNA in contemporary Siberians but only a small trace, so that was a great surprise,” says Willerslev.

And, crucially, this population does not appear to be the direct ancestor of Native Americans.

Instead, analysis of the collection of genomes suggests the population that became the ancestors of native North Americans was the result of interbreeding about 20,000 years ago between East Asians, who travelled north, and a group distantly related to the Ancient Northern Siberians. The East Asians also mixed with other descendants of Ancient Northern Siberians to give rise to another group, dubbed the Ancient Paleo Siberians, who went on to supplant the existing group.

Willerslev estimates that Native Americans can trace about two-thirds of their ancestry to these Ancient Paleo Siberians.

“[Ancestors of] Native Americans are not the first people in northeastern Siberia as most people, if not everybody, thought,” he concludes. “This is the first evidence we have, real evidence, of something very close genetically to Native Americans.”