Evidence proving how and when North America was first colonised by humans has been uncovered by scientists.
DNA belonging to a prehistoric human child suggests Alaska was first populated around 25,000 years ago, 10,000 years earlier than had previously been thought.
Published in the journal Nature, the findings “represent the oldest lineage of Native Americans so far discovered”, says Professor Eske Willerslev, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Cambridge, who co-authored the study.
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Analysis of “Xach’itee’aanenh T’eede Gaay”, or sunrise girl-child as she is otherwise known, has enabled scientists to compare genetic similarities with other contemporary human species and chart the movement of ancient people from Asia to North America.
From this they have determined that the ancestors of all Native Americans descended from a single founding population that split from East Asians around 25,000 years ago.
“It would be difficult to overstate the importance of this newly revealed people to our understanding of how ancient populations came to inhabit the Americas,” Dr Ben Potter, an anthropologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and one of the lead authors of the study, told The Independent.
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