Posted on 02/11/2010 8:24:26 AM PST by FredJake
WASHINGTON (Reuters) –
Scientists have sequenced the DNA from four frozen hairs of a Greenlander who died 4,000 years ago in a study they say takes genetic technology into several new realms.
Surprisingly, the long-dead man appears to have originated in Siberia and is unrelated to modern Greenlanders, Morten Rasmussen of the University of Copenhagen and colleagues found.
"This provides evidence for a migration from Siberia into the New World some 5,500 years ago, independent of that giving rise to the modern Native Americans and Inuit," the researchers wrote in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.
Not only can the findings help transform the study of archeology, but they can help answer questions about the origins of modern populations and disease, they said.
"Such studies have the potential to reconstruct not only our genetic and geographical origins, but also what our ancestors looked like," David Lambert and Leon Huynen of Griffith University in Queensland, Australia, wrote in a commentary.
The DNA gives strong hints about the man, nicknamed Inuk. "Brown eyes, brown skin, he had shovel-form front teeth," Eske Willerslev, who oversaw the study, told a telephone briefing. Such teeth are characteristic of East Asian and Native American populations.
He had the genes for early hair loss, too. "Because we found quite a lot of hair from this guy, we presume he actually died quite young," Willerslev said.
The man lived among the Saqqaq people, the earliest known culture in southern Greenland that lasted from around 2500 BC until about 800 BC.
Scientists have disagreed on who these people were -- whether they descended from the peoples who crossed the Bering Strait
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Very interesting DNA story about 4000 year old human that they did a gentic code break down on.
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So you can be called a “native” if you immigrated here 5,000 years ago?
He looks like he was really into Death Metal.
A civil blam.
It appears ancient people were more mobile than we thought.
A genome map wasn’t all he needed....He apparently had the gene for getting lost...thats a heckuva trip from Siberia to Greenland.
Yet another piece of evidence that suggests the Arctic Ocean has been ice-free in the past.
Marco Polo wrote that he sailed to a spot on the ocean around 1200AD where he saw “the pole star in the south”. Since he also used a crude magnetic compass, and assuming* that magnetic north at that time was somewhere near its current position, that means that he sailed an ice-free Arctic Ocean almost to Greenland. This is quite possible, in my view, since Earth’s temperature then was several degrees warmer than current “high” temperatures.
*admittedly a somewhat shaky assumption
His wife kept begging him to pull over and ask for directions, but noooooooo.......
Thanks. Ping.
It’s not too surprising that North America has had more than one group migrate in from outside of NA. This process continues today.
According to Genesis 10:25, the trip might have been a lot easier before the continents were divided.
Yet another piece of evidence that suggests the Arctic Ocean has been ice-free in the past.
Yes indeed... and we would not have had the rumors of the famed "Northwest Passage" either, unless it was warmer and people were able to get through... :-)
Yes..., very interesting...
I’d love to know how this guy got to Greenland.
Gondwana started breaking up in the mid-Jurassic, about 167 million years ago. That's a wee bit early for the gent we're speaking of from 2,000 BCE.
ummm... greenland is in the new world??
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