The Genome That Didn’t Fit

The genome was real.

The dates were real.

The burial context was real and carefully documented.

And yet when the scientists finished their analysis and looked at where the ancient Alaskan infant fit in the growing family tree of ancient American populations, the result did not match what they had expected.

The child — a female infant who had been buried approximately 11,500 years ago in a hearth feature at a site in interior Alaska — was not closely related to any of the Native American populations that geneticists had previously sequenced.

She was not most similar to the people who had been analyzed from the Great Plains, the Pacific Coast, the Amazon, or any of the other regions where ancient or modern Indigenous American genomes had been studied.

She was something different.

Something older-looking, in the specific statistical sense that geneticists use when they describe one lineage as more basal than another.

She belonged to a previously unidentified branch of the first Americans — a branch that scientists would call the Ancient Beringians.

And finding her in Alaska, at a date that placed her among the earliest well-preserved ancient genomes from North America, immediately raised questions that researchers have been working to answer ever since.

Not questions about whether she was Native American.

She was — unambiguously, in every relevant genetic sense.

The questions were more specific and more interesting than that.

They were questions about the founding of the Americas itself: about whether the first people to populate the Western Hemisphere came in one founding event or several, about whether Beringia — the broad land connection between Asia and North America during the Ice Age — was a thoroughfare or a homeland, and about what happened to the lineage she represented in the thousands of years that followed her death.

The answers that emerged from the analysis of her genome — and from the larger body of ancient American genomic research that the Upward Sun River findings fit into and helped reshape — are among the most significant developments in the study of human prehistory in the twenty-first century.

This is the story of a small infant buried in a prehistoric hearth in Alaska, and of what her bones told the world about who the first Americans really were.

The Landscape Above The Arctic Circle