Science Focus
original post »The exact process by which humanity introduced itself to the Americas has always been controversial. While there's general agreement on the most important migration—across the Bering land bridge at the end of the last ice age—there's a lot of arguing over the details. Now, two new papers clarify some of the bigger picture but also introduce a new wrinkle: there's DNA from the distant Pacific floating around in the genomes of Native Americans. And the two groups disagree about how it got there.
Prior to the advent of cheap DNA sequencing, there were all sorts of ideas regarding the peopling of the Americas. While migration across the Bering land bridge was the consensus opinion, it wasn't clear how many migrations took place—or even who, exactly, did the migrating. Because of the physical diversity of modern Native American populations, people have suggested additional migrations across the Pacific or even from Europe or Africa.
The Clovis people, who had what appears to have been the continents' first distinctive technology and culture, caused further confusion. Some argued that these represented the first humans in the Americas, while others argued they represented a distinct migration into a sparsely populated hemisphere. Language groups created their own confusion.
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