By Charles Q. Choi published 1 day ago

A genetic study has revealed the existence of a previously unknown hunter-gatherer group that lived in Siberia upwards of 10,000 years ago.

Researchers investigating prehistoric DNA have discovered a mysterious group of hunter-gatherers that lived in Siberia perhaps more than 10,000 years ago.

The find was made during a genetic investigation of human remains in North Asia dating from as far back as 7,500 years ago. The study also revealed that gene flow of human DNA not only traveled from Asia to the Americas — as was previously known — but also in the opposite direction, meaning people were moving back and forth like ping pong balls along the Bering Land Bridge.

Furthermore, the team examined the remains of an ancient shaman who lived about 6,500 years ago in western Siberia. This spot is more than 900 miles (1,500 kilometers) west of the group that he had genetic ties with, according to the new genetic analysis.

More:
https://www.livescience.com/previously-unknown-hunter-gatherers-siberia

JANUARY 12, 2023

by Cell Press

The movement of people across the Bering Sea from North Asia to North America is a well-known phenomenon in early human history. Nevertheless, the genetic makeup of the people who lived in North Asia during this time has remained mysterious due to a limited number of ancient genomes analyzed from this region. Now, researchers reporting in Current Biology on January 12 describe genomes from ten individuals up to 7,500 years old that help to fill the gap and show gene flow from people moving in the opposite direction from North America to North Asia.

Their analysis reveals a previously undescribed group of early Holocene Siberian people that lived in the Neolithic Altai-Sayan region, near to where Russia, China, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan come together. The genetic data show they were descendants of both paleo-Siberian and Ancient North Eurasian (ANE) people.

"We describe a previously unknown hunter-gatherer population in the Altai as early as 7,500 years old, which is a mixture between two distinct groups that lived in Siberia during the last Ice Age," says Cosimo Posth at the University of Tübingen, Germany, and senior author of the study. "The Altai hunter-gatherer group contributed to many contemporaneous and subsequent populations across North Asia, showing how great the mobility of those foraging communities was."

Posth notes that the Altai region is known in the media as the location where a new archaic hominin group, the Denisovans, was discovered. But the region also has importance in human history as a crossroad for population movements between northern Siberia, Central Asia, and East Asia over millennia.

More:
https://phys.org/news/2023-01-ancient-siberian-genomes-reveal-genetic.html

Scientists have long known that ancient people living in Siberia made their way into what is now North America. Mounting DNA evidence suggests migration also happened in the opposite direction

By Freda Kreier on January 12, 2023



The sun rises over the Continental Divide in Bering Land Bridge National Preserve in Arctic Alaska. Credit: Natural History Library/Alamy Stock Photo
Science has long known that people living in what is now Siberia once walked (and later paddled boats) across the Being Strait into North America. But new evidence now shows that these early migrations weren’t one-way trips: in a study published on Thursday in Current Biology, researchers say they have uncovered traces of Native American ancestry in the DNA of Siberians who lived centuries ago.

This American heritage—still present in the genomes of some Siberians today—adds to a scattering of archeological evidence suggesting that North Americans were in contact with their northern Asian neighbors for thousands of years before Europeans arrived.

The discovery is not wholly unexpected. “Human movement is rarely unidirectional,” says the new study’s co-author Cosimo Posth, an archaeogeneticist at the University of Tübingen in Germany. “There is usually some back and forth.”

Exactly when and how people first arrived in the Americas is one of the longstanding debates in archaeology. Hypothesized dates vary widely, but many researchers agree that the earliest migrants likely traveled across the Bering Land Bridge, a strip of land that periodically connected northern Asia to modern-day Alaska in prehistory. This transcontinental highway succumbed to rising sea levels sometime between 11,000 and 10,000 years ago, but that didn’t stop migrations between the landmasses. Genetic studies and archaeological digs indicate that people from Siberia made the move into North America several more times, including as recently as 1,000 years ago.

More:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-americans-crossed-back-into-siberia-in-a-two-way-migration-new-evidence-shows/

That’s probably one reason why we don’t find traces of the tools they used to get from here to there.

once they retired.

Analysis of ten Eurasian individuals, up to 7,500 years old, gives a new picture of movement across continents

Brian Handwerk
Science Correspondent

January 12, 2023

Whether by walking a land bridge or traveling by boat, hunter-gatherers ventured out from eastern Eurasia some 20,000 to 30,000 years ago to become the first Americans. But the intercontinental journey wasn’t a one-way trip. Several times in history, genetic studies show, Native Americans returned across the Bering Strait to Eurasia—long before Europeans began arriving in distant parts of the Americas.

Now, new genetic research is mapping out those ancient migrations back and forth across the Bering Strait and elsewhere across Eurasia during key periods of human prehistory. Scientists have recently recovered ancient DNA from the well-preserved bones and teeth of ten eastern Eurasian individuals, from 7,500 to 500 years old, and they published their findings on Thursday in Current Biology. The new evidence helps show that from the coasts of America and Japan to the Siberian interior, some of our deep ancestors’ populations may have been more mobile and intermixed than anyone would have imagined.

Whether by walking a land bridge or traveling by boat, hunter-gatherers ventured out from eastern Eurasia some 20,000 to 30,000 years ago to become the first Americans. But the intercontinental journey wasn’t a one-way trip. Several times in history, genetic studies show, Native Americans returned across the Bering Strait to Eurasia—long before Europeans began arriving in distant parts of the Americas.

Now, new genetic research is mapping out those ancient migrations back and forth across the Bering Strait and elsewhere across Eurasia during key periods of human prehistory. Scientists have recently recovered ancient DNA from the well-preserved bones and teeth of ten eastern Eurasian individuals, from 7,500 to 500 years old, and they published their findings on Thursday in Current Biology. The new evidence helps show that from the coasts of America and Japan to the Siberian interior, some of our deep ancestors’ populations may have been more mobile and intermixed than anyone would have imagined.

Whether by walking a land bridge or traveling by boat, hunter-gatherers ventured out from eastern Eurasia some 20,000 to 30,000 years ago to become the first Americans. But the intercontinental journey wasn’t a one-way trip. Several times in history, genetic studies show, Native Americans returned across the Bering Strait to Eurasia—long before Europeans began arriving in distant parts of the Americas.

Now, new genetic research is mapping out those ancient migrations back and forth across the Bering Strait and elsewhere across Eurasia during key periods of human prehistory. Scientists have recently recovered ancient DNA from the well-preserved bones and teeth of ten eastern Eurasian individuals, from 7,500 to 500 years old, and they published their findings on Thursday in Current Biology. The new evidence helps show that from the coasts of America and Japan to the Siberian interior, some of our deep ancestors’ populations may have been more mobile and intermixed than anyone would have imagined.

Cosimo Posth, an archaeogenetics expert at the University of Tübingen, in Germany, and colleagues described the genomes of ten different individuals who lived in three key regions: Siberia’s Altai Mountains, the Kamchatka Peninsula and other parts of the Russian Far East. Environmental conditions—cold climates at high latitudes—allowed for optimal preservation of DNA that was hundreds to thousands of years old. “In these environments you can find individuals with 70 to 80 percent of human DNA in their bones, comparable to what you’d get if you extracted saliva from you or me,” says Posth. “You can actually generate a genome of the same quality as a modern genome. It’s amazing stuff.”

Analysis of the DNA from those ten individuals provided several key revelations about ancient migrations. First, the broad movements of ancient humans and cultures across Eurasia are evidenced by the discovery of an entirely new population that lived in Siberia’s Altai Mountains. That culture’s descendants, the authors show, were part of lineages that later helped populate both Europe and the Americas. Secondly, individuals of Japan’s Jomon culture, isolated in the archipelago for thousands of years, migrated back to the Asian mainland from which their ancestors came. And finally, Native Americans migrated back into Asia several times over a span of thousands of years.

More:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/ancient-dna-evidence-charts-native-american-migrations-back-across-the-bering-sea-180981435/