The 11,500-Year-Old Baby Found In Alaska — And The DNA That Revealed A Lost Branch Of The First Americans
Found in a baby.
In Alaska.
The story of who was first in the Americas has always been more complicated than any single model could contain.
USR1 made it a little more complicated, and in doing so, a little more truthful.
The Consultation That Shaped The Research
The research at Upward Sun River was shaped, from its earliest phases, by consultation with Indigenous communities — a process that is worth describing in more detail than it typically receives in accounts of the scientific findings.
Ben Potter and his team understood, from the beginning of their work at the site, that the Tanana Valley was the traditional territory of Athabascan communities who had both a legal interest in the treatment of ancient remains found within that territory and a cultural and historical interest in how those remains were interpreted and discussed.