January 14, 2023
The remains of three people who died in Kamchatka, Siberia show they had North American genes. So people traveled back and forth across the Bering Sea region. Researchers studied genetic and linguistic evidence that showed folks in North America boated back to Siberia. This new DNA evidence bolsters the proof of this. The evidence from this new DNA study shows evidence of this return journey 5,000 years ago and 1,500 years ago.
However, critics point out that the genes identified as North American comes from a group that never left Siberia but shares ancestry with Native Americans.
Ancient Siberia is turning out to be a crossroads. Altai hunter-gatherers in Siberia are related to Bronze Age people from Central Asia. One who appears to have been a shaman in the burial remans had northeast Asian ancestry. And one has ancestry from the Jomon people in Japan.
The research is published in Current Biology
Science.org has the report here.
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