The 9,000-Year-Old Child’s Tooth Found In An Alaska Cave — And The DNA Test That Revealed A Lost Population Of The First Americans
Mitochondrial haplogroup B is one of the founding Native American haplogroups, carried by diverse Indigenous communities across the Americas from Alaska to South America.
The specific B2 designation indicates a particular subclade within the broader B haplogroup that is found in specific Native American populations and that connects the Trail Creek child’s maternal line to a lineage that has been present in the Americas since the founding period.
The mitochondrial haplogroup identification adds a specific maternal lineage dimension to the picture established by the genome-wide analysis.
Together, they indicate a child whose ancestry was both deeply Beringian — in the specific sense of belonging to the Ancient Beringian branch that diverged early in the founding population’s history — and connected through her maternal line to a haplogroup that continued into later Native American populations.