The discovery of two infants, ceremonially buried by a previously unknown population of ancient humans in Alaska around 11,500 years ago, offers stunning new clarity to the story of how humans came to inhabit the Americas, according to a new scientific paper. The Alaska study offers “direct genomic evidence that all Native Americans can be traced back to the same source population from a single Late Pleistocene founding event,” the paper claims. But they turned out to have come from a population that split off even earlier than the north and south groups. Either Ancient Beringians split from the ancestors of Native Americans while still in northeast Asia, and both groups separately migrated across Beringia to the New World. (Inuit, incidentally, at least partly represent a back-migration into the Arctic of northern Native Americans.)

Source: National Post January 03, 2018 20:26 UTC