Baby girl’s 11,500-year-old DNA sign of whole new group of ancient Native Americans?

New research has revealed that during the late Pleistocene epoch, some 20,000 years ago, the first group of Paleo-Indians with a distinct genetic makeup, now called Ancient Beringian, entered the present day Americas and persisted in Alaska for about the next thousands of years.

It is generally agreed that during the last Ice Age, between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago, the first inhabitants of the Americas entered the Western Hemisphere through crossing a temporary land bridge called Beringia, which at the time linked northeastern Siberia and western Alaska. Following their prehistoric migration, the originally Asian settlers, except for the newly-found group, branched into different groups and gradually spread southwards into the continent as the ice caps thawed.

Genomic analyses on 11,500-year-old DNA from the remains of a six-week-old baby girl, unearthed from the Upward Sun River archaeological site in Interior Alaska in 2013, led to the discovery of a previously unknown group of ancient Native Americans, the so-called Ancient Beringian, said a new study, whose results were published in the journal Nature earlier this week.

“We didn’t know this population existed. These data also provide the first direct evidence of the initial founding Native American population, which sheds new light on how these early populations were migrating and settling throughout North America,” said Ben Potter, a lead author of the study and a professor of anthropology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

The findings further suggested that a single founding ancestral Native American group separated from the inhabitants of East Asia around 35,000 years ago, which in turn split into two lineages about 20,000 years ago, the Ancient Beringians and the ancestors of all other Native Americans, after they stepped on the Americas, apparently in a single wave of migration.

Unlike other Native Americans that spread south throughout the rest of North America, the Ancient Beringians remained in the Far North until they eventually died out.

The information recovered from the DNA of the infant, who has been named by the local indigenous community Xach’itee’aanenh T’eede Gaay (sunrise child-girl), according to Potter, has provided an unprecedented window into the history of her people.

The sunrise child-girl was found in a place, where a younger baby girl, named Ye’kaanenh T’eede Gaay (dawn twilight child-girl), also rested in peace. But the researchers had better luck with the older girl, whose full sequenced genome shocked the international team. The ancestors of the seemingly first cousins likely entered Alaska 8,500 years or so earlier.

“We never expected the Upward Sun Child to be a representative of a Native American population completely different than we knew beforehand,” said Victor Moreno Mayar, one of the article's lead authors and a researcher at the Centre for GeoGenetics at the Natural History Museum of Denmark.

Although the results of the study impressed many anthropologists and archeologists, some others appear to be not that convinced. David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard University, said although the study gathered evidence for a single migration into Alaska, it did not rule out alternatives involving multiple waves of cross-continent migration.

Furthermore, he expressed doubt that the ancient Beringian group could actually have managed to split from the ancestors of other Native Americans 20,000 years ago, arguing that even tiny errors in scientists’ data could lead to fundamentally different split times for evolutionary lineages.

“While the 19,000-21,000 year date would have important implications if true and may very well be right, I am not convinced that there is compelling evidence that the initial split date is that old,” Reich added.

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