New link found between Native Americans and first humans in America

The view from the hill below which the remains of the Anzick child were discovered.

The study, led by the University of Copenhagen, is based on genetic data from the skeleton of a young boy – just one year old when he died – that was found at a burial site named Anzick in Wilsall, Montana. The boy belonged to the Clovis people who lived in America 12,600 years ago.

“The genome of this 12,600 year old individual clearly anchors Native Americans to the people that have been associated with the ancient Clovis culture”, says Professor Mattias Jakobsson, at Uppsala University’s Department of Ecology and Genetics, one of the researchers behind the study.

The Clovis people are named after the city Clovis, New Mexico, where their distinct stone tools were found in the 1920s and 1930s. They were not the first humans in America, but were among the first with a wide expansion on the North American continent – until the culture mysteriously disappeared only a few hundred years after its origin.

Pontus Skoglund, PhD and researcher at the Department of Ecology and Genetics, performed an analysis on the Anzick boy’s genetic data showing that his family shared about one third of their genes with the 24,000 year-old child from Mal’ta at Lake Baikal in Siberia.

“One theory that has gained a lot of attention has claimed that the Clovis people came from Europe over the Atlantic. Our findings do not support this theory – the Anzick child has the same origins as most Native American groups in America today”, says Pontus Skoglund, PhD.

“The genetic data shows that Native American ancestors were likely the first people to colonize the American continents”, says Professor Mattias Jakobsson.

Roughly 80% of today’s Native Americans on the two American continents are direct descendants of the Anzick boy’s relatives. Although the Clovis culture disappeared its people are living today.