12.2: The Beringians
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In 2013 the remains of one female, 6-week-old infant and one stillborn baby were found in Alaska during an excavation in the Tanana River Valley. While DNA was recovered, it took several years for scientists to successfully uncover the genetics of these people, whose camp dated back 11,500 years. What scientists found was unexpected: the genetic material did not match either the northern or southern lineages of Native Americans, but actually a unique genetic lineage that marked a new population.
This new population is called the “ancient Beringians” and is thought to have branched from the original Native American population 35,000-20,000 years ago; these people stayed in the northern part of the Americas until they died out. Scientists compared the genome from the infant, named Xach’itee’aanenh t’eede gaay, which means “sunrise child-girl,” to those of modern people and found that almost half of her genome came from Ancient people who live in what is now known as Siberia. The other half is a mixture of modern northern and southern Native Americans.
During an Ice Age, water levels drop, exposing land that forms land bridges. One of these is the Bering Strait (hence the name Beringians), which connects Asia and North America. The ancestors of modern Native Americans are thought to have crossed this bridge more than 20,000 years ago. It was then thought that these split into the northern and southern group. However, one archaeologist on the discovery thinks the explanation is that the Beringians split from their original group in Eurasia before crossing into the Americas (Etheridge-Criswell, 2018).