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

It waited through the 1949 excavation, the journey to Copenhagen, the decades in the collection.

It waited through the development of radiocarbon dating, the invention of DNA sequencing, the revolution in ancient-DNA analysis that made it possible to extract genomic information from tiny, degraded specimens.

It waited for Jeff Rasic to encounter it in 2016 and recognize what it might be.

The scientific results from the Trail Creek tooth are, in themselves, significant contributions to the understanding of the first Americans.

The confirmation of Ancient Beringian ancestry at 9,000 years on the Seward Peninsula — extending the documented range of this founding lineage by 2,500 years — changed how researchers thought about the persistence and distribution of the Ancient Beringian population in early Alaskan prehistory.