DAN Sequence Extracted From 4,000 Year-old Man; Changes North America Migration Debate

February 20th, 2010

According to the researchers at Natural History Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen, a nearly complete sequence of nuclear DNA was extracted from a man over 4,000 years old.

Morten Rasmussen of the Natural History Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen and his colleagues, have discovered that the Greenlander, they call him Inuk, seems to have origins different from the natives that have been discovered before in North America, and Greenalnd in particular. His nuclear genome indicates that his father’s ancestors came from northeastern Siberia.

This means that he is not related to native North Americans, and that he displays a closer genetic link to three other civilizations. Three modern hunter-gatherer groups in that region — the Nganasans, Koryaks and Chukchis area closer match than the natives. Since we can;’t get a strivectin sd interview from the guy this is about as good a chance to figure this out as you can get.

Danish-led excavations more than 20 years ago unearthed four fragmentary bones and several hair tufts belonging to this ancient man, dubbed Inuk. His remains were found at a site from the Saqqaq culture, the earliest known people to have inhabited Greenland. Saqqaq people lived in Greenland from around 4,750 to 2,500 years ago. One popular hypothesis traces Saqqaq ancestry to Native American groups that had settled Arctic parts of Alaska and Canada by 11,000 years ago.

Inuk’s strong genetic ties to Siberian populations raise a different scenario. “We’ve shown that this ancient individual was not related to Native Americans but derived from an expansion of northeastern Asians into the New World and across to Greenland,” says geneticist and study coauthor Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen.