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Scientists reveal 10,000-year-old mummy is Native American ancestor
Scientists attempting to map out the historical migrations of North and South America by analysing ancient bones have revealed that a 10,000-year-old skeleton unearthed in a cave in Nevada is the ancestor of a Native American tribe.
The iconic skeleton, known as the “Spirit Cave mummy”, was reburied this summer by the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone people in Nevada, bringing closure to a decades-long legal dispute with anthropologists who fought for it to remain on display in a museum.
DNA painstakingly extracted from the ancient skull proved the skeleton was an ancestor of the tribe and discredited a longstanding theory that the individual was from a group of “Paleoamericans” that existed in North America before Native Americans.
The full genetic details of the skeleton, which is the world’s oldest natural mummy, are published as part of a wide-ranging international study of the ancestry of North and South America. The project also found evidence of two previously unknown migrations into South America and revealed surprising traces of Australasian ancestry in indigenous South Americans that hint at a far earlier arrival of modern humans to the Americas – potentially dating back 30,000 years or more.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/nov/08/scientists-prove-10000-year-old-mummy-is-native-american-ancestorThe iconic skeleton, known as the “Spirit Cave mummy”, was reburied this summer by the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone people in Nevada, bringing closure to a decades-long legal dispute with anthropologists who fought for it to remain on display in a museum.
DNA painstakingly extracted from the ancient skull proved the skeleton was an ancestor of the tribe and discredited a longstanding theory that the individual was from a group of “Paleoamericans” that existed in North America before Native Americans.
The full genetic details of the skeleton, which is the world’s oldest natural mummy, are published as part of a wide-ranging international study of the ancestry of North and South America. The project also found evidence of two previously unknown migrations into South America and revealed surprising traces of Australasian ancestry in indigenous South Americans that hint at a far earlier arrival of modern humans to the Americas – potentially dating back 30,000 years or more.