Genetic analysis has unveiled a previously unknown group of people who lived in Siberia during the last Ice Age around the borders of modern-day Russia, China, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan. It appears this mysterious group of people also had links to the multiple waves of humans who made the daring journey to North America.
By the looks of things, some people actually migrated back in the “opposite” direction from North America to North Asia via the Bering Sea. This ancient legacy of the Americas still lives on in some people currently living in northeastern Siberia.
To reach their findings, scientists led by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology analyzed the genomes of ten individuals who lived in the Altai region of southern Siberia around 7,500 years ago. Paired with this, they looked at the genetic makeup of Eurasian and Native American populations in the present day.
Their data revealed the Altai hunter-gatherers had a “unique gene pool” that indicates they were descendants of two key groups that lived in this part of Eurasia at the time: the paleo-Siberians and the Ancient North Eurasian (ANE) people.
“We describe a previously unknown hunter-gatherer population in the Altai as early as 7,500 years old, which is a mixture between two distinct groups that lived in Siberia during the last Ice Age,” Cosimo Posth, senior study author from the University of Tübingen in Germany, said in a statement.
“The Altai hunter-gatherer group contributed to many contemporaneous and subsequent populations across North Asia, showing how great the mobility of those foraging communities was,” he added.
Hellbound and Down 