The 13,000-Year-Old Child Found In Montana – And What His DNA Revealed About The First Americans
The genome showed no evidence of a closer relationship to European populations than would be expected from the general shared ancestry of all modern non-African humans, who carry some Neanderthal DNA and share a common Out-of-Africa ancestry.
There was no European genetic signature in Anzick-1’s genome that exceeded what background global relatedness would predict.
The Solutrean hypothesis, already facing serious archaeological objections, now faced a direct genetic refutation: the most ancient North American genome available showed no European-specific genetic affinity.
The child in the Montana hillside was not a descendant of Ice Age Europeans.
He was, genetically, an American — the earliest of Americans whose genome we have been able to read.
The genome also provided evidence about a more specific question: the relationship between the population that Anzick-1 belonged to and the populations of living Native Americans in North and South America.