Human evolution; New Northeast genetic group (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, January 13, 2023, 16:37 (680 days ago) @ David Turell
edited by David Turell, Friday, January 13, 2023, 16:57

About 10,000 years ago showing Bering Sea migrations back and forth:

https://www.livescience.com/previously-unknown-hunter-gatherers-siberia?utm_term=C3CFD6...

"A genetic study has revealed the existence of a previously unknown hunter-gatherer group that lived in Siberia upwards of 10,000 years ago.

"The find was made during a genetic investigation of human remains in North Asia dating from as far back as 7,500 years ago. The study also revealed that gene flow of human DNA not only traveled from Asia to the Americas — as was previously known — but also in the opposite direction, meaning people were moving back and forth like ping pong balls along the Bering Land Bridge.

"Furthermore, the team examined the remains of an ancient shaman who lived about 6,500 years ago in western Siberia. This spot is more than 900 miles (1,500 kilometers) west of the group that he had genetic ties with, according to the new genetic analysis.

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"Many of the individuals were found in an area known as the Altai, a crossroad for migrations between northern Siberia, Central Asia and East Asia for millennia, located near where modern-day Russia, China, Mongolia and Kazakhstan come together. Previous research in the Altai revealed the first evidence of the mysterious and much older human lineage known as the Denisovans, who together with the Neanderthals are the closest extinct relatives of modern humans.

"The scientists discovered that a previously unknown group of hunter-gatherers in the Altai was "a mixture between two distinct groups that lived in Siberia during the last Ice Age," Posth said. DNA from these prehistoric hunter-gatherers was found in many later communities across North Asia, from the Bronze Age (about 3000 B.C. to 1000 B.C.) to the present day, "showing how great the mobility of those foraging communities was," he added.

"In addition, the researchers discovered multiple episodes of gene flow from North America to Asia over the past 5,000 years, with genes from the New World reaching Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula on the Pacific Ocean and central Siberia.

"'While there has been a lot of work showing flows of genetic ancestry into the Americas, there has been less evidence for backflow from the American continent to Eurasia," said Vagheesh Narasimhan(opens in new tab), a geneticist at the University of Texas at Austin, who did not participate in this study. "This work presents a new sample from northeastern Asia to support these results."

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"Overall, the study shows that prehistoric groups were more connected than previously believed.

"All in all, "geographically distant hunter-gatherer groups showed evidence of genetic connections to a much larger extent than previously expected," Posth said. "This suggests that human migrations and admixtures [interbreeding between groups] were not the exception but the norm also for ancient hunter-gatherer societies.'"

Comment: this DNA identification shows relatively recent hybridization of modern humans. The mystery of exactly when humans reached North America is still unclear.

The source article:

https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(22)01892-9?dgcid=raven_jbs_aip...