American Indians of Asian descent

The Indians of North and South America have Asian roots

02/13/2014

After decades of puzzling over the origins of Native Americans, scientists have now discovered that Asian immigrants were the ancestors of North America's early population. This is the conclusion reached by the international team of researchers around the paleo-biologist Eske Willerslev from the University of Copenhagen after the comprehensive gene analysis of the genome of a boy buried in Montana 12,600 years ago.

The bones of the under-two-year-old boy, discovered in 1968 during construction work on a private ranch near the small town of Wilsall, are the oldest known skeletal remains in North America. He was a member of America's earliest culture, the so-called Clovis culture. The „The boy's genome sequence shows that today's indigenous groups in North and South America have all emerged from a single population that crossed the Bering land bridge from Asia to America“, the scientists report in the trade magazine „Nature“. Thus, the theory of a descent of the natives of Europeans refuted. „The analysis also points to an early separation between the ancestors of the Clovis people and a second group whose DNA is found in the population of Canada and Greenland“; Report Willerslev and colleagues

Asian immigrants were the ancestors of the Indians
The scientists sent fragments of the millennium-old skull to Copenhagen, where the DNA was extracted and used for so-called mitochondrial genome sequencing, „which provides a snapshot of the maternal descent of a person.“The sequencing data revealed that the boy has a closer genetic relationship to the indigenous American population than to any other group studied. Also, similarities with the genome of the Siberian population from the Upper Palaeolithic were found. Thus, the hypothesis of a descent of the Native Americans of Asian immigrants is confirmed, whereas the descent of Europeans is refuted. Michael Waters, from the Institute of Anthropology and Geography at Texas A & M University, co-author of the study, explained that the genetic analysis not only confirms the boy's Asian ancestry, but also found that his family members were direct ancestors of today's Native Americans , (Fp)