Early Human Dispersals within the Americas

A new study entitled, “Early Human Dispersals within the Americas” was published in Science on November 8^th by researchers from the University of Copenhagen and University of California schools summarized in Science Daily.  The researchers sequenced the genome of 15 ancient humans found in North America (ranging from Alaska to Patagonia), including some that had not been analyzed previously and compared them to genomes from nearly 400 contemporary humans as well as to SNP panels of nearly 200,000 SNPs. They found that Native Americans did not migrate out of Beringia until about 12,000 years ago and once they did engaged in a rapid expansion and split into many different populations. They also found that these early Native Americans first reached South America about 11,700 years ago and found they mixed with an Australasian population around this time. In the middle to late Holocene another wave of migration came from Mesoamerica into South America. Finally, they were able to discern that two samples from Lagao Santa and Spirit Cave that were initially labelled to be “paleoamericans” that predated the presence of Native Americans in the Americas due to their unusual cranial morphology were, in fact, Native Americans that likely had unusual skulls as a result of population isolation.