Human Origins by New Scientist

Author:New Scientist
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2017-12-19T05:00:00+00:00

The Anzick Child

In 2014 geneticists studied the genes of an American boy, known as the Anzick Child, who died 12,600 years ago. He was the earliest ancient American to have their genome sequenced. Incredibly, he turned out to be a direct ancestor of many peoples across the Americas. The find offered the first genetic evidence for what Native Americans have claimed all along: that they are directly descended from the first Americans. It also confirmed that those first Americans can be traced back at least 24,000 years, to a group of early Asians and a group of Europeans who mated near Lake Baikal in Siberia.

We may never know who the Anzick Child was – why he died, at just three years old, in the foothills of the American Rockies; why he was buried, 12,600 years ago, beneath a huge cache of sharpened flints; or why his kin left him with a bone tool that had been passed down the generations for 150 years.

Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and his colleagues were able to extract enough viable DNA from the boy’s badly preserved bones to sequence his entire genome. They then compared this with DNA samples from 143 modern non-African populations, including 52 South American, Central American and Canadian tribes.

The comparison revealed a map of ancestry. The Anzick Child is most closely related to modern tribes in Central and South America, and is equally close to all of them – suggesting that his family were common ancestors. To the north, Canadian tribes were very close cousins. DNA comparisons with Siberians, Asians and Europeans show that the further west populations are from Alaska, the less related they are to the boy.

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