The 31,000-Year-Old Children’s Teeth Found Above The Arctic Circle — And The DNA Test That Revealed A Lost Ice Age Population Connected To Native American Origins
But the enterprise — living in the Arctic, making it work, raising children in it — is the same enterprise across all of that time.
The genetic trace of the Ancient North Siberians in the genomes of modern people is real, even if attenuated.
Through the Kolyma-like populations, through the ancestral Native American founding population, a component of ANS-related ancestry reaches into the present.
It is small, diluted by thousands of years of mixing.
But it is there.
The children at Yana contributed, in the most molecular possible sense, to the ongoing human story.
Their genomes — preserved in milk teeth in the permafrost, sequenced in modern laboratories — revealed a chapter of that story that was otherwise entirely invisible.