America's First Tribe May Have Numbered Only About 200
Researchers have spent decades guessing who peopled the New World. A band of Siberian travelers? Australian immigrants? The specifics remain unclear, but in June population geneticist Jody Hey of Rutgers University made the first real stab at determining exactly how many settlers started it all. The number is surprisingly small. Hey conducted a statistical analysis of short sequences of both DNA and mitochondrial DNA from Chinese, Mongolian, Korean, and Siberian natives. Then he compared them with the same bits in Native Americans, as well as those in Yucatán and Mexican Mayan Indians. By plotting differences, Hey estimated the effective size of the founding population: about 70 adults of reproductive age.
The analysis suggests that a founding tribe of a couple of hundred people (including elderly, children, and others who could not reproduce) may have migrated to North America across a Bering ...
