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The remains of a baby from 11,500 years ago may help explain how the first humans populated America.
Scientists have uncovered the remains of a six-week-old girl in a burial pit in Central Alaska. They extracted DNA from her skull and found out that she came from a group of Native Americans that has not been discovered yet.
The researchers said that this discovery provides evidence of a single wave of migration to the Americas, and that both the girl’s group and the present-day Native American lineage descended from this population.
According to the researchers, a group of people parted ways with East Asians around 36,000 years ago and trekked to America using a land bridge. This group was eventually divided into two.
The first group scattered themselves in the northern and southern regions of America around 20,000 years ago and were the ancestors of the Native Americans today. The newly discovered second group, which the girl belonged to, was dubbed the ‘Ancient Beringians’ by the researchers. Unlike the first group, however, they eventually fizzled out. Scientists theorize that they may have all died or mixed with an entirely different group.
The group was named by researchers after Beringia, the term used to refer to the area around Eastern Siberia and Alaska during the Ice Age.
Meanwhile, the baby girl was given a local Alaskan name that means ‘sunrise girl.’ The remains of another much younger girl were actually found next to her, but researchers were unable to analyze her poorly-preserved DNA.