A large group of researchers is exploring the genetic history of modern Native Americans and where their ancestors originated.
Scientists from all over the world published two new studies in tandem in the journals Science and Nature examined the DNA of Native Americans, Central and South Americans, as well as non-Americans from around the globe, according to AFP.
Authors of the paper published in Science detailed one migration from Siberia into North America via the Beringia land bridge, which is now the Bering Strait, about 23,000 years ago. Some 10,000 years later, the migration split the people into two distinct groups: American Indians and Alaskans.
"Using coalescence analyses, not just using one piece of DNA, but the entire genome, we find that the earliest someone could have come to the Americas was 23,000 years ago," study co-author Michael Crawford, a professor of anthropology at the University of Kansas, said in a press release. "This study also pretty well does in the whole idea that gene flow from Europe contributed to the original migration of present-day Native Americans."
The Nature paper took a look at a human group called "Australasians," people who descend from Australia, New Zealand, New Guinea, and some Pacific islands nearby. The researchers were able to find subtle, but noticeable genetic similarities between the Australasians and modern South Americans.
"This finding was really surprising to us," study lead author Pontus Skoglund, a population geneticist at Harvard Medical School, told Live Science. "Most genetic studies to date have basically found that all North and South Americans come from a single ancestral source population. That's not what we found - we found a more complicated scenario."
