Footprints dated to 23,000-21,000 years ago at the White Sands National Park, New Mexico.

All images courtesy

Matthew Bennett/Bournemouth University

Finding the First

Americans
Archaeology and genetics can’t yet agree on when
humans first arrived in the Americas. That’s good
science and here’s why

by Jennifer Raff 

Jennifer Raff is associate professor in anthropology and affiliate faculty member in the
Indigenous Studies Program in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University
of Kansas. She is the author of Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas (2022).
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 T he debate over how people first arrived in the Western Hemisphere
continues to roil archaeology in the United States – and to capture public
attention. Today, the scientific community is contending with significant amounts
of new genetic and archaeological data, and it can be overwhelming and even
contradictory. "ese data are coming from new archaeological excavations but
also from the application of newly developed tools to re-analyse prior sites and
artefacts. "ey’re coming from newly sequenced genomes from ancient peoples
and their contemporary descendants, but also from re-analysis of prior sequence
data using new modelling tools. "e generation of new data at times feels as
though it’s outpacing efforts to integrate it into coherent and testable models.

Did humans first populate the Americas 100,000 years ago, 30,000 years ago,
15,000 years ago, or 13,000 years ago? Did they come by boat or by an overland
route? Were the ancestors of Native Americans from one population or several?
"e answers to these questions would help us understand the grand story of
human evolution. We know that the Americas were the last continents that
anatomically modern Homo sapiens – humans like us – entered, but we don’t
know exactly how this happened. "ese long-ago movements give us hints about
the challenges ancient peoples across the world had to contend with during the
Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), a prolonged period of coldness and aridity, when
animals, plants and humans retreated to environmental ‘refugia’ for several
thousand years. How did we survive this Ice Age? What technological and
biological adaptations arose as the result of these environmental conditions?
"ese questions capture the popular imagination and challenge the scientists
working to uncover the details of individual lives thousands of years in the past.

To their Indigenous descendants, the stories we tell about these First Peoples of
the Americas are highly relevant for additional reasons. "eir deep ties and claims
to the lands have often been ignored or expunged by governments, media and
corporations across North and South America in order to make room for
narratives that are more palatable, exciting or convenient to certain non-Native
groups. "e historical exclusion of Indigenous peoples from making decisions
about research on their own ancestors and lands has caused significant harms to
Native communities and individuals; when Native scientists and community
members are full participants in the research process, the stories that emerge are
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 not only more respectful but also more accurate.

A rchaeological evidence establishes that Indigenous peoples were present in

the Americas at least 15,000 years ago. Scientists don’t agree, however, on
when people first arrived. Some archaeologists claim it must have been much,
much farther back, citing evidence such as flaked stones in layers dating to
~30,000 years ago at the Chiquihuite Cave site in Mexico, bones with cut marks
in layers dating to 34,000 years ago in Uruguay, flaked stones in layers dating to
30,000-50,000 years ago in Brazil, and even broken mastodon bones dating to
130,000 years ago in California. All of these claims are heavily disputed.
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 A general view of excavations at the White Sands site in New Mexico

As a rule, an archaeological site won’t gain widespread acceptance as legitimate

unless there is clear evidence of human activity, that evidence can be securely
dated, and it is found in an undisturbed geological context. For example, a hearth
containing the remains of charred animal bone fragments and stone tool
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 fragments at the Dry Creek site in Eastern Beringia (near the present-day Denali
National Park in Alaska) was dated to 13,485-13,365 years ago from wood
charcoal pieces taken from within the hearth. "e stone tools – resharpened
blades, flakes, end scrapers, and the byproducts of manufacturing them – and
repeated controlled fires used to cook animal bones clearly indicate a human
presence. "e intact stratigraphy and multiple independent radiocarbon dates
from the hearth tell us when people were using this particular part of the site. To
archaeologists, this is uncontroversial. In contrast to the Dry Creek site, there is
no consensus that the very early sites discussed above have met that standard;
critics argue that the stone ‘artefacts’ and ‘butchering’ marks could be the result
of natural phenomena (or even, in some cases, left by modern construction
equipment). "ere simply hasn’t been any uncontroversial physical evidence of a
human presence in the Americas more than 15,500 years ago.

As they walked along the muddy surface, their

feet mushed tiny seeds of ditch grass into the
ground

"en, in 2021, a team of archaeologists dropped a bombshell into this debate:

they’d found footprints – unquestionable evidence of a human presence – at
White Sands National Park in New Mexico, dating to between
23,000-21,000 years ago.
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 Footprints from Site 2 at White Sands

"e White Sands Locality 2 site was once the shore of an ancient lake. For more
than 2,000 years, humans and animals visited it. As they walked along the muddy
surface, their feet mushed tiny seeds of ditch grass into the ground, leaving a vital
organic trace that archaeologists can use for carbon dating. (Some archaeologists
have criticised the dating methods used, but there is general agreement that the
presence of human tracks with fauna known to have gone extinct around
11,000 years ago dates these to – at minimum – the end of the Pleistocene.) If the
find holds up to scrutiny, physical evidence of a human presence in the Americas
during the LGM would be a paradigm-changing event, pushing back the date of
the earliest migrations to sometime before 25,000 years ago.

W hen European settlers and explorers first encountered the Native peoples
of the Americas, they sought to force the fact of the Native people’s
existence into a Biblical worldview. "e First Peoples, who built the impressive
earthworks, monuments, temples and pyramids throughout the Americas, were
recast as members of a lost tribe of Israelites, Irish sailors, or possibly Vikings, for
the ideological convenience of settlers.
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 "e pretence that the first peoples of the Americas were a different race than
Native Americans – a view known today as the Myth of the Moundbuilders –
became extremely popular in the 18th and 19th centuries. Andrew Jackson
explicitly used it in 1830 to justify the brutal Indian Removal Act:

In the monuments and fortresses of an unknown people, spread over the

extensive regions of the West, we behold the memorials of a once powerful
race, which was exterminated or has disappeared to make room for the
existing savage tribes.

As the field of archaeology matured and incorporated the scientific method,

scholars began to reject the Moundbuilder Myth. By the end of the 19th century,
the US government funded an investigation of mounds throughout North
America to identify their creators. "e evidence persuaded researchers that the
mounds were built by the ancestors of contemporary Indigenous Americans, not
some mysterious, lost race. "e resulting Twelfth Annual Report of the Bureau of
Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution (1890-91) marked a new
era in archaeology. In time, the archaeological, cultural and biological evidence all
pointed to shared ancestry with Asians, suggesting that the ancestors of Native
Americans came to the continents via a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska.

"e question of when did this migration begin remained. Poorly understood
geological and cultural chronologies made it a difficult matter to address.
Radiometric dating methods were not invented until 1946, and strong rivalries
between scientists promoting their own models confused the issue.

In the Clovis First model, hunter-gatherers

travelled from Siberia to North America across
the Bering Land Bridge

"e 1927 discovery of a human-made projectile (spear point) at the Folsom site in
New Mexico proved a turning point. "e spear point was associated with the
remains of a bison that had gone extinct at the end of the Pleistocene (around
11,700 years ago). Even without radiometric dating methods, researchers knew
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 that a human artefact embedded in an animal that went extinct long ago had
pushed back the date at which humans were living in the Americas. It marked
another important shift in the study of human origins in the Western Hemisphere.
Archaeologists used such artefacts to begin piecing together a bigger historical
narrative.

"e model that emerged and dominated the field for decades has come to be
called ‘Clovis First’. It is named after the technologies first found in 1929 at a
Pleistocene kill site near the town of Clovis in New Mexico. Characterised by a
thin, lance-shaped projectile point flaked on both sides with a single, long flake
removed at its base on each side (known as a ‘flute’), the Clovis point is unique to
North America. It appeared widely across the continent beginning about
13,400 years ago, near the end of the LGM.

Because of their sudden appearance and spread, and in the absence of recognised
earlier sites, many archaeologists believed that the Clovis tools were evidence of
the very earliest inhabitants of the Americas. "e Clovis First model held that a
small group of hunter-gatherers travelled from Siberia to North America across
the Bering Land Bridge. "ey then followed southward an ice-free corridor that
warming temperatures had opened along the eastern Canadian Rocky
Mountains. "e population dispersed rapidly across the continents, leaving their
newly invented projectile points embedded in their prey, or cached in special
locations, along the way.

T he Clovis First model faced challenges from growing evidence of an earlier

human presence in the Americas. Some of it was archaeological; signs of a
human presence at the Monte Verde site in Chile dated to more than 1,000 years
before the first appearance of Clovis. As the science of genetics matured, it added
a critical source of evidence against the Clovis First model. Sequencing of DNA,
and assuming that DNA bases mutate at a known and constant rate, allowed
geneticists to estimate when different populations last shared a common ancestor.
Depending on which mutation rate was used, the genetic evidence suggested a
last common ancestor for Native Americans anywhere from 15,000 to
30,000 years ago, or 2,000 to 17,000 years earlier than accounted for by the
Clovis First model.
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 "is is not all that’s revealed by genetic studies of mitochondrial DNA from
ancient and contemporary Native Americans. "ey also showed that the ancestors
of the First Peoples had undergone a period of isolation before their lineages
diversified. "e molecular clock – a dating method based on the rate at which
DNA mutates – tied this isolation period to roughly the height of the LGM,
beginning about 21,000-20,000 years ago. "is is when climate conditions across
the globe forced people and animals to retreat into refugia to escape the
encroaching ice. When, 17,000 years ago, a potential coastal route in the
Americas opened as the ice sheet retreated from the Pacific, lineages began to
diversify more rapidly as they spread across geographic space and encountered
each other less frequently to spread newly arising genetic variants.

In the last generation, geneticists have integrated their data with archaeological
and climatic evidence to produce a three-stage model for the peopling of the
Americas. First, approximately 20,000 years ago, a group of Asians migrated into
Beringia. "ey remained isolated there for thousands of years, during which they
evolved the founding lineages seen across the Americas. "en about
17,000-16,000 years ago they migrated out of Beringia into the Americas, rapidly
peopling the continents. Still later, migrations from Beringian populations then
peopled the Arctic. "e genetic variation present in Indigenous peoples of the
Americas was the result of local evolutionary processes with no gene flow from
populations outside the continents. "is mitochondrial DNA-based model has
come to be known as the ‘Beringian standstill’ or ‘Beringian incubation’
hypothesis.

Native Americans today can trace their

genomes to Ancient North Eurasians and an
ancient East Asian group

"e genetic evidence for the Beringian standstill hypothesis was based on certain
types of DNA – like mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosome DNA – that are
inherited from just one parent. "ese are relatively easy to extract, work on and
understand, but they have limitations. "e full human genome is massive, with
3 billion base pairs and some 20,000 genes. Each stretch of DNA has its own
history of evolution, and each may closely resemble that of the parent population
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 or differ from it in important ways. "e most accurate histories that can be
reconstructed from DNA come from the study of the entire genome, not single
genes.

Getting complete genomes from ancient individuals is difficult. After an organism

dies, the cellular processes responsible for repairing damage to DNA cease to
work. Over time, an organism’s DNA fragments and accumulates damage until at
some point it is no longer possible to recover; exactly how quickly this occurs
depends on a combination of environmental conditions and time. In 2010,
Danish and Chinese scientists led a study that mapped the first complete genome
of an ancient human, from a Palaeo-Inuit Saqqaq man who lived 4,000 years ago
in Greenland. "is work from Morten Rasmussen, Yingrui Li and Stinus
Lindgreen brought the ‘palaeogenomics revolution’ to the Western Hemisphere
and transformed our understanding of human history across the continents.

Complete genomes from ancient humans in the Americas allowed researchers to

model biological histories on a scale never imagined before. Because each nuclear
genome reflects the contribution of thousands of ancestors, entire population
histories can be reconstructed from just a few individual genomes. Genomes from
the past can often reveal details of human biological history that were obscured
by later demographic events (such as population migrations). While models
generated from genomic data can’t give insights into all aspects of human history
(particularly issues pertaining to cultural identity), they nevertheless provide a
powerful way of understanding biological relationships through time.

"e sequencing of ancient genomes in Siberia brought one of the most important
insights into Native American population history. "e first evidence of humans
living above the Arctic Circle comes from the Yana Rhinoceros Horn site in
northeastern Siberia, where year-round settlements of humans have been dated
to 31,600 years ago. From DNA retrieved from the baby teeth of two young
children growing up at the site, geneticists were able to piece together a picture of
a large Upper Palaeolithic population ancestral to the Ancient North Siberians, a
group identified from the genome of a child buried at the Mal’ta site near Lake
Baikal 24,000 years ago. "e Ancient North Siberians were ancestral to Siberians,
Central Asians and Europeans. "e genome from the Mal’ta child revealed to
palaeogeneticists that this group of Ancient North Siberians contributed some
ancestry to the Beringian population who gave rise to the First Peoples. Native
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 Americans today can trace between 14-38 per cent of their genomes to the
Ancient North Eurasians, with the rest from an ancient East Asian group, likely
from China. "is gene-flow event between the First Peoples’ ancestors took place
sometime between about 23,000-18,000 years ago.

Population models based on ancient genomes confirmed the Beringian standstill

hypothesis. "is means that the population’s isolation coincided with the height
of the LGM, approximately 23,000-19,000 years ago, when sea levels would have
been approximately 100 metres lower than today, and water bound in continental
ice sheets. Across Siberia, as in other parts of the Northern Hemisphere,
conditions would have been extremely dry and cold. In fact, the archaeological
record indicates that Siberia was essentially depopulated. Genomes cannot tell us
where the ancestors of Native Americans were isolated but they do tell us that
they were isolated. Many geneticists believe that, because they were isolated, it’s
unlikely they were living in East Asia during the LGM – there were other groups
in the region, and proximity would likely have resulted in gene flow. "e southern
coast of the Bering Land Bridge in central Beringia is a likely candidate for a
refugium, as palaeoclimactic reconstructions show us that it had a relatively mild
climate, with abundant plant and animal resources. Since what was the Bering
Land Bridge now lies mostly under the Chukchi and Bering Seas, it is difficult to
test this hypothesis. Some archaeologists are investigating potential LGM-period
sites with hints of human presence at Bluefish Caves in the Yukon, or at Lake E5
in the Brooks Range of Alaska. So far, no definitive evidence of a human presence
during the LGM has been found in western Beringia.

Since we cannot tie the population ancestral to the First Peoples to any specific
technological or cultural manifestation in the archaeological record, their location
during the LGM between 23,000 and about 16,000 years ago remains a mystery
for now.

O ne of the more astonishing insights palaeogenomes have given us is that the

population ancestral to Native Americans split into several branches during
its isolation between approximately 24,000 and 16,000 years ago. Geneticists
refer to one of the branches as the ‘Ancient Beringians’. "e Ancient Beringians
were identified through the genomes from children buried 11,500 years ago at the
Upward Sun River site in the Tanana River Valley in Alaska and from a young girl
buried 9,000 years ago at the Trail Creek Cave site on the Seward Peninsula.
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 "ese genomes suggest that the Ancient Beringian population was widespread
across what is now Alaska, but also limited to Alaska. It did not persist
(genetically) into the present day; Indigenous Arctic populations do not seem to
have Ancient Beringian ancestry. We may eventually find people with Ancient
Beringian ancestry as we characterise more genetic variation in present-day and
ancient people, or it may be that this population ultimately diminished without
leaving any descendants.

Another branch emerged approximately 24,700 years ago. ‘Unsampled

Population A’ was identified indirectly from its contribution to the genomes of the
ancestors of contemporary Mesoamericans and South Americans.

The First Peoples’ migration was mainly by

boat along the west coast of Alaska, rather than
on foot

"e third known branch that emerged during the isolation period is known as
‘Ancestral Native Americans’. It is ancestral to all populations south of Alaska. Its
dispersal southward throughout the Americas, most likely down the Pacific coast,
saw a series of population splits. "e earliest of these populations, identified by
the genome of an individual from the Big Bar Lake site in British Columbia, split
from the other Ancestral Native Americans as early as 21,000 years ago. "e other
two groups, known as ‘Northern Native Americans’ (in Alaska and northwestern
Canada) and ‘Southern Native Americans’ (south of Alaska and Canada),
diverged from each other some time after 17,000 years ago as they moved south.

Southern Native American populations dispersed throughout the Americas

extremely quickly. We know this from the rapid divergence of lineages in ancient
members of these groups. Because the speed and timing of their divergence is
earlier than the most likely date for the opening of an interior route through the
glacial ice (the Ice-Free Corridor along the Eastern Canadian Rockies), the model
suggests that the First Peoples’ migration was mainly by boat along the west coast
of Alaska, rather than on foot. In fact, the earliest archaeological evidence of
people in the Ice-Free Corridor dates to shortly after 13,000 years ago, and
indicates they were moving northward, rather than southward.
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 Following the initial dispersal sometime after about 21,000 years ago, the next
20,000 years brought a complicated series of population movements throughout
South and North America. Glaciers that had been preventing eastward movement
across the North American Arctic melted, and two successive migrations then
peopled the eastern half of the continent. "e first was by Palaeo-Inuit around
5,000 years ago, and the second by the ancestors of contemporary Inuit peoples
between about 1,000 and 750 years ago. "ese two groups were culturally very
different, but shared ancestry with Siberian populations, and at least the direct
ancestors of living Indigenous Arctic peoples shared gene flow with members of
the Northern Native American group. Population geneticists are still trying to sort
out the complicated population histories of different Indigenous groups within
the Arctic from both contemporary and ancestral genomes.

O n a Saturday afternoon in April 2022, I sat in a packed hotel conference

room in Chicago at the annual meeting of the Society for American
Archaeology. It’s not a conference I usually attend, but I’d been asked to serve as a
discussant in a session presenting the results from the White Sands site in New
Mexico. I had decided in advance that my presentation would focus on trying to
reconcile the genetics and archaeological records.

As I sat squeezed in between Dennis O’Rourke, the anthropological geneticist

who was serving as the other discussant, and E James Dixon, an eminent
archaeologist, I was excited to hear about the excavation of the White Sands site
directly from the archaeologists who had studied the footprints up close. To a rapt
audience of archaeologists – which included many sceptics of its purported
23,000-21,000-year dates – Vance Holliday, "omas Urban, Clare Connelly, David
Bustos, Amber Kalush, Matthew Bennett and Daniel Odess discussed their
excavation of the site, how they obtained dates, how they worked with tribal
partners, the future of the site, and the implications of the dates in the context of
current models for the peopling of the Americas.
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 Timeline relating to the discovery of the tracks at White Sands

"ey had a formidable task; White Sands presents a radical challenge to our
understanding of the earliest humans in the continents. If the 23,000-21,000-year
dates are accurate, it would mean that people had to have made their way into the
continents before the ice sheets fused, by 25,000 years ago or earlier. What could
account for the huge time gap between the White Sands site and the
archaeological and genetic evidence showing a migration after 17,000 years ago?

The seeds embedded in the footprints were not

from plants growing in water but on the
lakeshore

I recognised several people in the audience who had been shocked and sceptical
when the dates had been published a few months prior. ‘"ey just can’t be right,’
an archaeologist told me at the time. "ere are some legitimate concerns about
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 the site, which were raised during the question period of the symposium and in
subsequent publications. "ese objections are not, as at other early sites, that the
evidence for humans was ambiguous. "ere could be no question the footprints
were human, and their immediate proximity to mastodons and giant sloths meant
that they were unquestionably Late Pleistocene. Rather, the major concern raised
primarily by geoarchaeologists is about the dating of the Ruppia cirrhosa seeds
found embedded in the footprints.
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 The ditch grass seeds from which the team were able to date the excavations

Ruppia (ditch grass) can be influenced by the so-called hard-water effect in which
plants growing in water take up old carbon present in it, making samples appear
hundreds to thousands of years older than they actually are. Sceptical
archaeologists believe that the hard-water effect may be biasing the carbon-14
dates, and that additional dating – ideally of features with other carbon sources –
is needed to confirm the ages of the site.

Another concern, raised by the archaeologist C Vance Haynes of the University of

Arizona, concerns the stratigraphic integrity of the sites. Specifically, he raised the
possibility that the Ruppia seeds might not be from the same geological layers as
the footprints. Rather, he suggests, the seeds might have been redeposited by
wind from older strata elsewhere at the site into younger contexts. "e apparent
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 co-occurrence of human and Late Pleistocene animals at the site might be due to
humans crossing over extinct animal trackways thousands of years later.

If this scenario is correct, additional dating from other organic sources (besides
Ruppia seeds) should eventually demonstrate that the geological layers that
contain the footprints date to after the LGM, perhaps to the Clovis period, which
begins around 13,000 years ago.

But during the symposium and in a subsequent publication led by Jeffrey S Pigati
of the US Geological Survey, the archaeologists who excavated White Sands
robustly responded to these concerns. "e hard-water effect was not biasing the
dates, they explained, because the seeds were not from plants growing in water,
but rather on the lakeshore, and because all dates were in good stratigraphic
order. "ere was no possibility that the human footprints postdated the Late
Pleistocene animals’ footprints because in many cases they were in layers
underneath (and therefore geologically older than) animal trackways.

To each objection or concern, they have given a patient and convincing answer.
And yet the debate rages on.

H owever frustrating this debate may be for all participants – and I imagine it
can be very frustrating at times – to me it is an excellent example of the
dynamic process of the scientific method. Claims are advanced, they are robustly
criticised, and additional evidence is brought forward to refute the critiques. Bit
by bit, the field advances in its understanding.

I sincerely hope that the public understands this debate, and indeed the broader
debate about details regarding the peopling of the Americas, in this light.
Unfortunately, because science is all too often taught in school as a collection of
facts, rather than a dynamic process of enquiry, people can be vulnerable to being
misled by opportunists such as Graham Hancock. A self-described investigative
journalist, Hancock has made a career of weaving metaphysical stories about the
past for audiences eager to believe that there is a conspiracy among thousands of
archaeologists, geologists, palaeoclimatologists and geneticists like myself to
suppress the ‘truth’ about the past. In his Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse (2022),
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 Hancock fantasises about imaginary ‘alternative’ theories of the past, including
the Americas, telling audiences they can acquire suppressed knowledge without
the tedium of actually engaging with evidence.

But, as we have seen, debate about population history models is a normal part of
the scientific process. Contrary to claims made about us, scientists emphatically
don’t want dogma to stifle the consideration of new ideas. In contrast to
‘alternative historians’, scientists demand a rigorous evaluation of evidence in
considering these ideas.

In contrast to metaphysical storytelling, we

have testable hypotheses

"ere is certainly robust debate about the peopling of the Americas. White Sands,
along with other pre-LGM sites, provides a good example of how this debate
progresses. For most sceptical archaeologists, the attitude to the claims of the
White Sands findings is not hostility, but a cautious ‘let’s wait and see’. It may be
that, just as the Folsom and Clovis sites showed archaeologists where to look for
evidence of Late Pleistocene humans associated with the remains of extinct
animals, White Sands may show us where to look for even earlier peoples. Or it
may be that additional dates will eventually show us that White Sands is younger
than the LGM.

"e important thing is that, in contrast to metaphysical storytelling, we have

testable hypotheses. We know what evidence is needed to test these hypotheses,
and archaeologists are out in the field right now gathering that evidence.

Outstanding questions

One of the limitations of our current understanding of biological population

histories in the Americas is that they are based on very few ancient genomes. Our
sampling of genetic diversity across the Americas is very incomplete. "e reasons
for this are in part historical. Non-Native scientists inherit a legacy of insensitive
and exploitative research from our forebears, one that has left Indigenous peoples
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 with little incentive to trust us with the remains of their ancestors. If we wish this
to change, we have a great deal of work to do and many factors to consider. "ere
are ongoing discussions about what constitutes appropriate ethical practices in
our field, including who is doing the research, who is interpreting the results, and
who has the right to determine what is done with the data that result from it. "e
histories we infer from archaeology and genetics are not abstract to contemporary
Native Americans, who have their own scientific and historical knowledge
stretching back for countless generations; how we tell the stories that emerge
from our genetics data are of critical importance to them. "e acquisition of DNA
from ancient individuals usually requires the destruction of small portions of
bone or teeth; this may be incompatible with a community’s values for how
ancestors should be treated.

Any palaeogenomics project must contend with these issues, and that often takes
a great deal of time. "e slow nature of the consultation process – building
relationships, respecting ‘no’ from communities who refuse research on their
ancestors, co-designing a project with community partners from those who wish
to do so – is at odds with the fast-paced, intensely competitive research
environment characteristic of palaeogenomics. But if we wish to do research in a
better way, this process cannot be rushed or circumvented in the pursuit of data.

Our limited sampling of ancient genomes may mean that there is still more
genetic variation than accounted for in our models; we may yet have biases in our
estimated dates. In addition, there are puzzling findings that need additional
genetic data to resolve.

A trans-Pacific migration from southeast Asia

does not in fact comport with the genetic
evidence

One major unsolved mystery that whole genomes revealed is the shared ancestry
between some South American and Australasian populations (from Australia,
Melanesia and southeast Asia). Geneticists refer to this ancestry as from the
‘Ypikuéra population’ or ‘Population Y’. Population Y is seen scattered
inconsistently in genomes throughout the Amazonian and Pacific coastal regions;
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 it has been found in South American genomes as early as 10,000 years ago.

What could account for this pattern? It’s one of the biggest mysteries currently in
the field. A trans-Pacific migration from southeast Asia that seems to offer an easy
explanation does not in fact comport with the genetic evidence. Such a migration
would leave a very different pattern of genomic footprints; Population Y ancestry
is too old, too scarce, and too inconsistent to be explained by this model. Instead,
we can trace the Population Y ancestry, tentatively, to East Asia; a 40,000-year-old
individual from Tianyuan Cave in China carries its genetic signature. Most likely
he represents a population no longer present in the region, which gave rise to
both the ancestors of Australasians and Population Y.

So how did Population Y get into the Americas? Given current data, two scenarios
suggest themselves. First, Population Y may have been present in the isolated
group that gave rise to the different branches of the First Peoples during the
LGM. It’s easy to imagine a scenario of a geographically dispersed
metapopulation, consisting of multiple groups living in different refugia across
Beringia, containing some families with this ancestry that simply didn’t get widely
shared due to limited contact. If these different groups entered the Americas
separately after 17,000 years ago, Population Y ancestry may have been limited to
certain descendant populations.

Another possibility ties together evidence of Population Y and potential

archaeological evidence at sites like White Sands. Could there have been multiple
migrations into the Americas, with one pre-LGM migration consisting of
Population Y individuals (and perhaps Unsampled Population A or other groups
we have yet to identify), and one post-LGM migration? "is would reconcile the
archaeological evidence of early traces of humans in the Americas (if they are
indeed legitimate, which has yet to be demonstrated to everyone’s satisfaction)
and the genetic data.

Archaeologists sceptical of White Sands’ early dates are dubious of the second
scenario, and it is admittedly speculative. We need a great deal more data, both
genomic and archaeological, to test it. But, as a field, we are actively engaged in
collecting that data, even as I type these words.
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 W e may never know exactly how the White Sands people fit into the
biological history of the Americas. But to members of the Pueblo of
Acoma, near the White Sands site, the identity of these individuals is not at all
mysterious. ‘"ousands and thousands of years ago, our ancestors walked this
place,’ said Kim Charlie, a member of the Pueblo of Acoma, in an interview with
Lizzie Wade for Science magazine in 2021. "eir language even has words for the
extinct megafauna seen at the site. In an example of how the discipline of
archaeology is evolving for the better, the Pueblo of Acoma is actively involved in
the recovery and study of these ancient footprints.

"e addition of more ancient genomes from Indigenous populations across time
and space will provide fascinating details about the lives, choices and movements
of the earliest peoples of the Americas. We already see this occurring, with
recently sequenced genomes from Brazil giving insights into migrations through
South America. I am excited to see what the future reveals about the past. But I
will venture to predict that, whatever my field does reveal, it will ultimately only
affirm what Indigenous peoples already know to be true: they have been here
since time immemorial.

aeon.co 22 December 2022

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