Anthropology
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Anthropologists confirm link between earliest Americans and modern Native-Americans
By Descrier Staff on May 16, 2014
The 12,000-year-old skeleton of a teenage girl discovered in a cave in Mexico has confirmed a genetic link between earliest Americans and modern Native-Americans.
Anthropologists have long debated the reasons as to why the skulls of ancient humans in the Americas were narrower and showed other distinct characteristics that differed from modern Native Americans, with some hypothesising that these people came to America from other regions around the world.
However, by studying the mitochondrial DNA from the tooth of the remains of the ancient teenage girl, who fell into a sinkhole in Mexicos Yucatán Peninsula more than 12,000 years ago, the researchers found a genetic lineage shared only by modern Native Americans.
Deborah Bolnick, assistant professor of anthropology at The University of Texas at Austin, said:
The Hoyo Negro girl was related to living Native Americans and has ancestry from the same Beringian population. This study therefore provides no support for the hypothesis that Paleoamericans migrated from Southeast Asia, Australia or Europe. Instead, it shows that Paleoamericans could have come from Beringia, like contemporary Native Americans, even though they exhibit some distinctive skull and facial features. The physical differences between Paleoamericans and Native Americans today are more likely due to changes that occurred in Beringia and the Americas over the last 9,000 years.
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Judi Lynn
(160,631 posts)DNA from skull links Ice Age girl to Native Americans alive today
Monte Morin
4:25 p.m. CDT, May 15, 2014
The divers called her Naia, for water nymph, because they discovered her teenage remains in a dark, underwater cave in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula.
She had been hidden there for more than 12,000 years along with the bones of dozens of extinct Ice Age beasts and divers quickly spotted her skull as they swept the chamber with flashlights.
It was a small cranium laying upside-down with a perfect set of teeth and dark eye sockets looking back at us, recalled diver Alberto Nava of Bay Area Underwater Explorers, a nonprofit conservation organization based in Berkeley.
On Thursday, researchers published a formal analysis of Naia's skeletal remains in the journal Science, calling it the oldest, most complete specimen ever discovered in the Americas.
More:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/la-sci-first-americans-20140516,0,3945932.story