Posted on 05/15/2014 11:37:31 AM PDT by Theoria
Remains Found in Mexico Connect Earliest Settlers With Continent's Natives
She was just a teenager when she died alone in the dark.
The scientists who analyzed her bones said Thursday that she is the oldest nearly complete, genetically intact human skeleton in the New World. Her remains—discovered deep within a flooded cave in Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula—cement the connection between the earliest settlers of the Americas and modern Native Americans.
A unique genetic marker exhumed from her 12,000-year-old skeleton offers evidence that the first hunter-gatherers who crossed the Bering Sea from northeast Asia on a now-submerged territory called Beringia belonged to the same population group as many Native Americans today, the scientists said.
"It is a lineage we see across the Americas," said anthropologist Deborah Bolnick of the University of Texas at Austin, who helped analyze maternal DNA extracted from a tooth taken from the skeleton.
The international team of 16 anthropologists, geneticists, and cave divers reported their findings Thursday in the journal Science.
If confirmed by additional research, the bones of a girl who long ago lost her way may help settle an emotionally charged debate that has raged among scholars for a century over the origins of the people who settled the New World and the identity of their descendants today. Other theories have held that the earliest settlers may have come from the South Pacific by boat or paddled across the Atlantic from Spain.
"This is one step toward resolving this question," said James Chatters, owner of Applied Paleoscience, an archaeological-consulting firm in Bothell, Wash., who led the research project.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Oldest Skeleton in Americas Found in Underwater Cave?[FR]
Undersea Cave Yields One of Oldest Skeletons in Americas[FR]
ping, looks like this one might be fun in the future. I look forward to more data on the haps.
How do they know she died alone and in the dark?
twitter account.
In before the Helen Thomas jokes.
They have PhDs, or maybe they read her diary.
I had the same question. I figure they found a video alongside her.
now-submerged territory called Beringia
PROOF of Global Warming! We’re all gonna die!
/of course, these folks came across Beringia using their greenhouse gas emitting SUV’s, right?
At a nearby site archaeologists found pieces of arrowheads, burned wood, and a fossilized milk carton with a "MISSING" charcoal drawing of her, noting she was last seen walking away into the woods at night.
So Native Americans aren’t.
They know everything. This is more of the junk science. Why did they find only her bones ? How about the other people that lived in this so-called time frame.
We all can from somewhere. Ebb and flow.
The batteries in her flashlight were dead.
Was it Girls Gone Wild? Teenage girls have been known to go pretty wild in Cancun.
Then again, since she was found in water, maybe his ancestor had an accident on a bridge.
“she died alone and in the dark?”
They had the EPA and Obamacare back then too? :-)
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
bang goes that theory about the Jews
They should be called Siberian Americans.
LOL!
She came across that land bridge from China so you know where the batteries were made. ;-)
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