Danish professor shock discovery: Native americans descended from Europe

Eske Willerslev sequencing of a genome of a boy who died 24,000 years ago, shows that a third of the Native Americans genetic material comes from Europeans.

Professor Willerslev from the Centre for Geogenetics at the University has once again managed to shock the other researchers, who now must consider to rewrite history.

"I'll just digest that 'Native Americans' is one-third of Europeans. It makes me dumbfounded, "says geneticist Connie Mulligan of the University in Gainesville to Science, which reports to the Conference Paleoamerican Odyssey, which was recently held in Santa Fe in the U.S..

During the conference Eske Willerslev showed the first results of a study of the genetic material from a four year old boy who was buried 24,000 years ago in Siberia in an area called Mal'ta, near Lake Baikal.

The interesting thing was that the boy's genome had no connection to modern East Asians, but part of the genome is shared with the contemporary native Americans. These must therefore had common ancestors with the boy.

Another part of the boy's genome shared only with individuals who exclusively live in Europe and the western part of Asia.

The boy was thus associated with Native Americans, but not the East Asians, which many believe to be their ancestors.

"It was very surprising," Willerslev explained according Science magazine at the conference.

The migration from Siberia to America

The general assumption is that America was populated for approx. 15,000 years ago in a migration across the country fixed area between what is now Siberia and Alaska. Therefore, the native Americans genome derived should exclusively come from East Asians . That's according to Willerslev new study is not the case .

When the genome of living Native Americans are found in European ´tracks´, you have assumed that they originate from colonization that occurred after Columbus discovered America. Eske Willerslev now claim that the European genome is many thousands years old.

A possible explanation could be that the ancestors of the Native Americans for more than 24,000 years, divided and became completely different groups. This could mean that the boy belongs to a group from Europe or the western part of Asia that moved to Siberia. At some point after the boy's death the population group was mixed with East Asians , and this mixed population is the one that walked to  America.

Exactly where or when this mix was done, one can still only guess, but Willerslev research group is investigating other skeletons further west in Siberia, which might shed some light on it.

Science tells us that not all participants at the conference were willing to buy Willerslev explanation without further ado. The issue is still debated until the scientific journal Nature published the article with all the details about the new DNA analysis , which Willerslev has written with his partner Kelly Graf from Texas A & M University .

Willerslev rejects to comment to the Engineer to follow the rules according to Nature's magazines not to make more comments until the article is published. which is expected to happen in the near time.

Alexander Kim from David Reich's research groups from Harvard Medical School published last year an article in Genetics magazine, that showed that Native Americans have genetic overlap with northern Europeans . He is very excited about Willerslev investigation , saying that the boy may be the missing link that explains the origins of Native Americans.

Source: http://ing.dk/artikel/dansk-professors-chokopdagelse-indianere-neds...

Translated and edited!