A recent study has found that the first people to share their DNA with Native Americans migrated to our land all the way from Siberia.
A team of researchers conducted genetic analysis and found that our ancestors came here about 23.000 years ago. They first settled in Alaska and may have stayed there for thousands of years before deciding to populate the rest of the North, as well as Central and South America.
The researchers hope that their study will finally settle the debate of who our true ancestors are. Some previous studies say that Europeans were the first to migrate to the Americas, while other previous studies claim that Polynesians are responsible for our heritage, and a very recent study even linked Australians to American DNA.
Siberians have been believed for a while to have migrated to the continent via a land bridge that used to unite the two continents. The new study reinforces these findings, showing that they did indeed use the Bering land bridge that separates Alaska and Russia in order to cross over into the Americas.
Yun Song, study leader and associate professor from the University of California (Berkeley), gave a statement admitting that the exact moment in time when Siberians migrated is difficult to pinpoint and there will always be a little uncertainty associated with it. However, he also went on to inform that the data will become more precise once more ancient genomes will be sequenced.
To reach the above mentioned conclusions, professor Song and his team looked at genome maps from the remains of no less than 23 different individuals from North America and South America. They were all found to have lived at different moments in time, somewhere between 200 and 6.000 years ago.
The next step for the researchers was to compare these old genome sequences to those of modern day humans who are part of Native American tribes, as well as those of Siberian inhabitants.
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