New data further supports that humans in the Americas arrived in a single wave from Siberia via the Bering Straight land bridge 12,000 years ago, fanning down the coast to today's South America.
Led by the University of Michigan, the study addresses a long debated topic among archaeologists and anthropologists: From where and when did people arrive in the New World. The land bridge's competing hypothesis strongly argues that people came by land and sea in successional waves over the past 30,000 years from various parts of Asia and/or Polynesia.
But the new data, comparing Native Americans to Siberian populations, argues against the idea of multiple waves. Scientists analyzed genetic data for 1,484 individuals from 78 populations, including 29 Native American groups and two Siberian groups and found that both genetic diversity and similarity to Siberians decrease with geographic distance from the Bering Strait.
"The widespread distribution of a particular allele private to the Americas supports a view that much of Native American genetic ancestry may derive from a single wave of migration. The pattern of genetic diversity across populations suggests that coastal routes might have been important during ancient migrations of Native American populations."
“If there were a large number of migrations, and most of the source groups didn’t have the variant, then we would not see the widespread presence of the mutation in the Americas,” said Noah A. Rosenberg, genetics professor at University of Michigan.
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