Toward the end of the last Ice Age, a baby boy, a year and a half old at most, was buried with great ceremony in central Montana, his body covered with spear points and tools made of stone, bone and elk horn sprinkled ceremonially with red ochre. He lay undisturbed for 12,500 years or so, until workmen quarrying stone for a new school found his grave on land owned by Melvyn and Helena Anzick. The Anzicks knew the discovery could be important, so they contacted an archaeologist—and a new paper in Nature has now made it clear just how important the infant, now known as Anzick-1, really is. A genetic analysis of his remains shows that the child’s genome is more closely related to modern Native Americans than to any other group. “He was part of the population that is ancestral to perhaps 80% of Native American people,” said Eske Willerslev, of the University of Copenhagen, one of the paper’s co-authors, in a press briefing. “And the rest are his cousins.” His genome also says clearly that Anzick-1’s ancestors came from Asia, and from Siberia in particular. That’s not a huge surprise, since the spread of humans into North and South America—the last continents to be populated by Homo sapiens—has long been believed to have come mostly from that direction. (MORE: Found: The Real Town of ‘Bedrock’) But a theory known as the “Solutrean hypothesis” holds that at least some of the earliest Americans came across the Atlantic instead. The evidence: stone tools that resemble those found in prehistoric European sites. These tools, first found near Clovis, New Mexico in the 1920s, were later found in multiple sites in the American West, including the Anzick site—and the people who made them were regarded for decades as the earliest humans in the New World. The idea that the Clovis people were the first Americans has since been demolished by discoveries of significantly older artifacts at sites ranging from Pennsylvania to Chile. And now the idea that the makers of Clovis tools … Continue reading Ice Age Infant’s Genes Show That Native Americans First Came From Asia