The 11,500-Year-Old Baby Found In Alaska — And The DNA That Revealed A Lost Branch Of The First Americans
The Specific Value Of One Infant’s Genome
It is worth being precise about what the USR1 genome can legitimately tell us and what it cannot, because the temptation — in scientific reporting and in popular accounts — is to claim too much for any single finding.
What the USR1 genome tells us: that an infant who lived in interior Alaska approximately 11,500 years ago belonged to a genetic lineage that was basal to all other sampled Native American populations.
That this lineage diverged from the ancestors of other Native Americans approximately 20,000 years ago, consistent with the Beringian standstill period.
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