24,000-Year-Old Body Shows Kinship to Europeans and American Indians
By Nicholas Wade,
The New York Times
| 11. 20. 2013
The genome of a young boy buried at Mal’ta near Lake Baikal in eastern Siberia some 24,000 years ago has turned out to hold two surprises for anthropologists.
The first is that the boy’s DNA matches that of Western Europeans, showing that during the last Ice Age people from Europe had reached farther east across Eurasia than previously supposed. Though none of the Mal’ta boy’s skin or hair survives, his genes suggest he would have had brown hair, brown eyes and freckled skin.
The second surprise is that his DNA also matches a large proportion — about 25 percent — of the DNA of living Native Americans. The first people to arrive in the Americas have long been assumed to have descended from Siberian populations related to East Asians. It now seems that they may be a mixture between the Western Europeans who had reached Siberia and an East Asian population.
The Mal’ta boy was 3 to 4 years old and was buried under a stone slab wearing an ivory diadem, a bead necklace and a bird-shaped pendant. Elsewhere at...
Related Articles
By Laura Ungar, Associated Press | 04.26.2025
Emily Kramer-Golinkoff can’t get enough oxygen with each breath. Advanced cystic fibrosis makes even simple things like walking or showering arduous and exhausting.
She has the most common fatal genetic disease in the U.S., which afflicts 40,000 Americans. But her...
By Mary Annette Pember, ICT News [cites CGS' Katie Hasson] | 04.18.2025
The sight of a room full of human cadavers can be off-putting for some, but not for Haley Omeasoo.
In fact, Omeasoo’s comfort level and lack of squeamishness convinced her to pursue studies in forensics and how DNA can be...
By Katrina Northrop, The Washington Post | 04.06.2025
photo via Wikimedia Commons licensed under CC by 3.0
China's most infamous scientist is attempting a comeback. He Jiankui, who went to jail for three years after claiming he had created the world's first genetically altered babies, says he remains...
By Anna Louie Sussman, The New York Times | 04.01.2025
When Noor Siddiqui was growing up, her mother developed retinitis pigmentosa, a condition that leads to gradual vision loss. When Ms. Siddiqui’s mother was in her 30s, she began going blind. Last summer, Ms. Siddiqui told a podcast host that...
