Such genetic analysis of Native American bones is highly controversial. It is a sacrilege to some. Others fear it could link their ancestors to Europeans, as this study has done. And some worried it could be misused in tribal disputes over who shares in the economic bounty from casinos that operate on the sovereign reservations.
Despite general resistence, representatives of tribes in the US recently gave their blessing for DNA analysis of the remains of a Stone Age child. Research conducted on the boy’s genes indicate that Native Americans have European roots.
It must have been a pretty special child, otherwise the two-year old wouldn’t have been buried in such a ceremonious manner. The boy was sprinkled with celebratory red dust and given distinctive stone artifacts for his last journey.
The characteristic fluting of the stone weapons serve as archeological evidence that the boy, who died some 12,600 years ago, came from the Clovis culture. It was one of the earliest New World groups, disappearing mysteriously a few centuries after the child’s burial in present day Montana. From the summit of a hill towering over the burial site near the Yellowstone River, the boy’s Ice Age contemporaries could monitor their hunting grounds for mammoth and bison.
Now a team of scientists led by the Danish geneticist Eske Willerslev has analyzed the boy’s origins and discovered that he descends from a Siberian tribe with roots tracing back to Europe. Some of the boy’s ancestors are likely even to have lived in present-day Germany.
Their findings go even further: More than 80 percent of all native peoples in the Americas — from the Alaska’s Aleuts to the Maya of Yucatan to the Aymaras along the Andes — are descended from Montana boy’s lineage.
[…]
