DNA points to southern China as origin of Native Americans

July 14 () –

For the first time, researchers have managed sequencing the genome of ancient human fossils from the late Pleistocene in southern China.

The data, published in the journal ‘Current Biology’, They suggest that the mysterious hominid belonged to an extinct maternal branch of modern humans that could have contributed to the origin of Native Americans.

“The ancient DNA technique is a really powerful tool,” says Bing Su of the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Kunming Institute of Zoology. “It tells us pretty definitively that the Red Deer Cave dwellers were modern humans instead of an archaic species, like Neanderthals or Denisovans, despite their unusual morphological features.

The researchers compared the genome of these fossils with that of people from around the world. They found that the bones belonged to an individual deeply linked to East Asian Native American ancestry.

Combined with data from earlier research, this finding led the team to propose that some of the South East Asian peoples had traveled north along the coast of present-day East China via Japan. and reached Siberia tens of thousands of years ago.

They then crossed the Bering Strait, between the continents of Asia and North America, and became the first people to reach the New World.

The path to this discovery began more than three decades ago, when a group of archaeologists from China discovered a large set of bones in the cave of Maludong, or Red Deer, in the Yunnan province, in the south of the country. Carbon dating showed that the fossils were from the Late Pleistocene, about 14,000 years ago, a period of time in which modern humans had migrated to many parts of the world.

In the cave, the researchers recovered a hominid skull with features of both modern and archaic humans. For example, the shape of the skull resembled that of Neanderthals and their brain it seemed to be smaller than that of modern humans.

As a result, some anthropologists had thought that the skull probably belonged to an unknown archaic human species that lived until quite long ago or to a hybrid population of archaic and modern humans.

In 2018, in collaboration with Xueping Ji, an archaeologist at the Yunnan Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, Bing Su and colleagues successfully extracted ancient DNA from the skull. Genomic sequencing shows that the hominid belonged to an extinct maternal lineage from a group of modern humans whose surviving descendants are now found in East Asia, the Indochinese Peninsula, and the islands of Southeast Asia.

The finding also shows that, during the Late Pleistocene, hominins living in southern East Asia had a rich genetic and morphological diversity, the degree of which is greater than that of northern East Asia during the same period. This suggests that the first humans to arrive in East Asia initially settled in the south before some of them moved north, Su says. “It’s an important test for understanding early human migration,” ensures.

Now the team plans to sequence more ancient human DNA using fossils from southern East Asia, especially those that predate the Red Deer Cave dwellers.

“These data will not only help us paint a more complete picture of how our ancestors migrated, but will also contain important information about how humans change their physical appearance by adapting to local environments over time, such as variations in skin color in response to changes in exposure to sunlightSu concludes.