"...From the complete nuclear genome of a Siberian
boy who died 24,000 years ago the oldest complete
genome of a modern human sequenced to date. His DNA
shows close ties to those of todays Native Americans.
Yet he apparently descended not from East Asians, but
from people who had lived in Europe or western Asia.
The finding suggests that about a third of the ancestry
of todayís Native Americans can be traced to western
Eurasia, with the other two-thirds coming from eastern
Asia,according to a talk at a meeting here by ancient
DNA expert Eske Willerslev of the University of
Copenhagen. It also implies that traces of European
ancestry previously detected in modern Native Americans
do not come solely from mixing with European colonists,
as most scientists had assumed, but have much deeper
roots..."

[m.sciencemag.org]

"...The MA-1 mitochondrial genome belongs to haplogroup U, which has also been found at high frequency among Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic European hunter-gatherers...Similarly, we find autosomal evidence that MA-1 is basal to modern-day western Eurasians and genetically closely related to modern-day Native Americans, with no close affinity to east Asians...Our findings reveal that western Eurasian genetic signatures in modern-day Native Americans derive not only from post-Columbian admixture, as commonly thought, but also from a mixed ancestry of the First Americans..."

[www.nature.com]

Charlie Hatchett