5 replies to this topic

[vermillion]

The original inhabitants of Greenland were not Eskimos or Native Americans but Asians/Siberians.

Ancient hair suggests multiple migrations into Americas
• 19:00 29 May 2008
• NewScientist.com news service
• Ewen Callaway


An ancient tuft of dark-brown human hair suggests that a tribe of humans trekked from north Asia to settle in what is now Greenland more than 4000 years ago – and then vanished.
A team of Danish scientists has found that DNA collected from the hair traces back to Asians, not Native Americans or the Eskimos that currently populate the region. This suggests that the first humans to colonise the American Arctic were distinct from the first people who arrived in America more than 14,000 years ago.
The hair – found in northern Greenland – may even be a relic of a steady trickle of human migrations across a harsh Arctic landscape, says evolutionary anthropologist Tom Gilbert of Copenhagen University in Denmark, who led the study. “It’s bloody hard work to colonise the Arctic. It is not an easy venture,” he adds.

Lucky break

The origins of the first Greenlanders – known as the Saqqaq – still puzzle archaeologists who have unearthed settlements, ornately sculpted tools made of animal bones, yet few human remains.
“One of the biggest mysteries is why the hell there are no bones,” Gilbert says. Based on archaeological evidence, the Saqqaq lived in Greenland between around 2500 and 800 BC.
In an effort to hunt for human remains, Gilbert’s colleague Eske Willerslev spent a summer in Greenland meticulously sampling animal bones for traces of human DNA, donning a forensic suit and mask to prevent contamination.
The search came up empty, but an archaeologist studying the Saqqaq mentioned he had collected a few clumps of hair in the 1980s. “It was chock full of human DNA,” Gilbert says, despite thousands of years in a deposit in Greenland and 25 years in a Copenhagen basement.
The DNA extracted from the hair is thought to be contaminant free because its sequences don’t match those of the European excavators.

Siberian link

To determine where the DNA came from, Gilbert’s team sequenced the genome of the owner’s mitochondria.
Humans inherit mitochondria – the cell’s “power houses” – only from their mothers, allowing geneticists to chart a person’s maternal lineage, from mother to grandmother to great grandmother, and so on.
Due to mutation and geographic isolation, differences that develop in mitochondrial DNA sequences can be used to trace the ancestry of humans, whether ancient or modern.
The Saqqaq hair belonged to a man descended from ancient Siberians, Gilbert’s team discovered. The DNA also matched people living on the Commander Islands, 175 kilometres east of Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula, whose descendents were exiled from Russia in the 19th century.
However, the Saqqaq man’s DNA bore little resemblance to the mitochondrial DNA characteristic of Native Americans, who first arrived in America at least 14,000 years ago, or to modern Eskimos, whose descendants arrived in the area about 1000 years ago.

Tribal trickle?

Because the sample is distinct from modern Eskimo populations, Gilbert’s team speculates that the Saqqaq originated from a distinct migration via Beringia – the landmass that connected Asia and America intermittently until about 7000 thousand years ago.
“If this is for real, then the suggestion is that the first migrants into Greenland must have come from the Bering region,” agrees Michael Crawford, a genetic anthropologist at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, US. However, he cautions that more sequences will be needed to confirm that conclusion.
Yet the Saqqaq migration may be the tip of the iceberg. Gilbert speculates that other tribes may have made it out of Beringia and into the American Arctic, some flourishing, others fizzling.
“On the grandest scale, it shows there were people coming in continually,” he says.

[kaiselin]

This new finding does not surprise me. I think the peoples of the north did not notice territorial boundaries in the ice.

[大泽升龙]

I wonder what is the real difference beween northeast Siberians, Inuits aka Eskimos/northern Amerinds. The Sino-Yenisei-NaDene super language cluster suggests they were of the same root - Adam and Eve.

[Chris Weimer]

I wonder what is the real difference beween northeast Siberians, Inuits aka Eskimos/northern Amerinds. The Sino-Yenisei-NaDene super language cluster suggests they were of the same root - Adam and Eve.

Adam and Eve? Come again?

[SKR]

lol nice try but we were already here.

[Taran ap Dafydd]

Well, other than the fact that the so-called "eskimoes" were already in place between 10,000-15,000 years ago, it's an interesting find. Certainly suggests that on occasion folks got lost on the ice and ended up in a different continent.
...But we already knew that. It Still happens...