Study’s senior author University of Utah anthropology professor Dennis O’Rourke said, “We see diversity that is not present in modern Native American populations of the north and we see it at a fairly early date”.
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The new findings bear directly on that question, because the two infants represent the only known multiple burial from the early Ice Age period, and are also the earliest human remains from the northern reaches of North America. But it was found that the infants DNA were Native American, which indicated that their mothers had been separate from Asian groups for quite a few time.
“It supports the Beringian standstill theory in that if they represent a population that descended from the earlier Beringian population it helps confirm the extent of genetic diversity in that source population”, said O’Rourke.
Scientists use the name Beringia to describe the vast area that linked Siberia and North America during the last Ice Age, from 28,000 to 18,000 years ago. Scientists were able to obtain the entire genetic blueprint of the two infants to establish that they were not related nor were they from the same lineages of Native Americans. This is evidence there was substantial genetic variation in the Beringian population before any of them moved south. These were the ancestors of today’s Native Americans. One had died shortly after birth, and the other, a late-term fetus, had apparently been stillborn.
Less sure, however, is what happened in Beringia, most of which is now submerged.
In the eight sites, “we find all five of the major lineages of Native Americans”, Tackney says.
In 2010, a team led by University of Alaska Fairbanks anthropologist Ben Potter discovered the remains of a cremated 3-year-old child buried near the hearth of a residential structure.
The new findings was published Monday by University of Alaska researchers in the journal “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences”.
The second infant had the common B2 lineage, which is found in 37 tribes: the Yakama, Shoshoni, Navajo, Zuni, the Aymara of Peru, and the ancient Fremont and Anasazi, too.
Still, the new study can’t settle the debate about how long people hung out in Beringia, Tackney said. Because most of central Beringia is now underwater and unlikely to reveal its secrets to archaeologists, Tackney adds, “this is the closest we might ever get to seeing what the Beringians were like genetically”. Others believe that this diversity is evidence of what’s called the Beringian standstill model – the hypothesis that one group migrated through Beringia but took its sweet time getting from one side of the region to the other.
The infants neither shared a mother nor a later Native American lineage, so the researchers are puzzled as to why they were buried together. The theory posits that about 25,000 ago, Siberians went east into Beringia and that they remained there for around 10,000 years.
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The proliferation and multiplicity is seen only in early man. The genetic changes that occurred in the ancient populations that survived the conditions on the Bering Strait show that their lifestyles transformed in accordance with the environment.
