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

The Population That Persisted

The persistence of Ancient Beringian ancestry in Alaska at 9,000 years — documented by the Trail Creek child — has implications that extend beyond the specific findings about this individual child’s ancestry.

Before the Trail Creek analysis, the picture of Ancient Beringian population history in Alaska was limited to a single data point: USR1 at approximately 11,500 years.

That single data point established the existence of the Ancient Beringian branch.

It did not, by itself, establish how long that branch persisted, where it was geographically distributed, or what its relationship was to the populations that came to dominate the Alaskan archaeological record in later millennia.