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An analysis of ancient DNA from a 24,000-year-old Siberian skeleton generates a new model for the original peopling of the Western Hemisphere. Native Americans may not have descended from East Asians who crossed the Bering Land Bridge more than 15,000 years ago, according to a new genomic analysis of a millennia-old Siberian skeleton. A portion of the nuclear DNA recovered from the upper arm bone of a 4-year-old boy that was buried near the Siberian village of Mal’ta about 24,000 years ago is shared by modern Native Americans and no other group. But the boy appears to have been descended...

Mark HoffmanSurrounded by white corn drying the traditional way, manager Jeff Metoxen talks about the benefits of white corn to a group of visitors from Germany last month at the Tsyunhehkwa Agricultural Center in Oneida. Oneida embrace planting, harvesting of white corn as a staple of diet, culture Mark HoffmanWhite corn has far fewer rows of kernels than its sweet corn cousin. Oneida - George Washington's troops at Valley Forge may have starved to death without the white corn an Oneida Indian chief gave them in the winter of 1777 during the Revolutionary War. Now, the Oneida, like other...

People who migrated from Asia to the New World camped out for 20,000 years on land now submerged under the Bering Strait between Alaska and Siberia, according to a genetic analysis published on Tuesday. A team at the University of Florida combined studies of DNA, archeological evidence, climate data and geological data to come up with their new theory, which describes a much longer migration than most other researchers have proposed. "We sort of went out onto a limb, incorporating all this nongenetic data," molecular anthropologist Connie Mulligan said in a telephone interview. Mulligan's team proposes that the people who...