The archaeological evidence left behind by the first people to settle the Americas tells a confusing story. Researchers have long understood that people migrated from Siberia to Alaska across a region called Beringia, which included a now-submerged land bridge — but they disagree whether the artifacts at Siberian sites resemble those on the other side of the Bering Strait. And the few skulls they’ve found of the earliest Americans don’t look much like those of modern Native Americans.
The sparse and sometimes conflicting data raised questions about who the first settlers of the Americas were, when they arrived and whether other waves of migration followed. The lack of evidence inspired some, shall we say, “esoteric” theories of Paleolithic settlers boating over from France or Polynesia. “For a while, everybody could [seem] right,” says Ted Goebel, an archaeologist at Texas A&M University who has worked at sites on both sides of the Bering Strait. Goebel is also co-author of a 2015 study published in Science that brings together genetic and archaeological data to end speculation.
The study, led by Eske Willerslev, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Copenhagen, compared the genomes of three ancient skeletons — a 24,000-year-old child found in central Siberia, a 12,600-year-old Montana child known as Anzick-1 and a 4,000-year-old Saqqaq Eskimo from Greenland — to the genomes of 31 indigenous people currently living in Asia, North and South America, and the Pacific islands. The results added to a growing body of evidence showing that all modern Native Americans share ancestry with the Anzick child, and that the majority of all indigenous people in the Americas can trace their lineages back to a single migration that took place about 15,000 years ago.
