DNA from a 14,000-year-old tooth sheds new light on the first Americans’ ancestry
DNA gleaned from a roughly 14,000-year-old fragment of a human tooth suggests that people inhabiting a surprisingly large swath of Asia were the ancestors of the first Americans.Using DNA already extracted from human remains at several ancient Siberian sites, archaeogeneticist He Yu of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, and her colleagues conclude that one of those ancestral populations originated in northeastern Asia, east of Lake Baikal. The other hailed from north-central Asia, west of the lake.It’s unclear where and when members of those two populations met up and mingled.
