August 4, 2022
The DNA from a 14,000 year old skull found in China has genetic ties to the east Asian ancestors of Native Americans. The individual has been named Mengzi Ren. The skull was founding Red Deer Cave in Yunnan in 1989. The skull belonged to a female Homo sapien. It took a long time for scientists to find DNA in the skull they could measure.
This is the first time an ancient East Asian genome was sequenced at the same time people were migrating into America confirming the East Asian ancestry of Native Americans.
(My note; this is the first time Clovis era folks are tied to East Asians at the time of Clovis entry. The ancestry of Pre-Clovis people entering the Americas is still a subject to research.)
The Chinese team did speculate that the folks related to Mengzi Ren traveled through the Japanese islands before entering the Americas which has been a theory for awhile, and now more provable.
The research is published in Current Biology, DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2022.06.016
Newscientist has the report here.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2328757-ancient-dna-adds-to-evidence-for-native-americans-east-asian-ancestry/
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