Who were the First Americans? It’s a question that for decades has divided researchers, who have proposed competing theories as to how humans moved from Eurasia into North America.
The question is far from settled, though it is clear that by about 14,500 years ago (and perhaps as far back as 30,000 years ago) humans had moved from Siberia to present-day Alaska and begun to spread throughout the Americas.
Now, two new studies published simultaneously in Nature are giving some more insight into who those First Americans might have been, in addition to information about later waves of migration that contributed to the Native Americans and the genetically and culturally distinct Inuit still in the region today.
Two teams of researchers, one led by Pavel Flegontov, from the University of Ostrava in the Czech Republic, and the other by University of Copenhagen geneticist Martin Sikora, used information from ancient genomes ...
