Sorry that this turned into a weekly dose of science instead of a daily dose of science for a while! No guarantees, but I'll see if I can post more frequently again. I also activated comments!
Today's news (and this one is actually news from the past two weeks) is that although past research has generally shown that Native North Americans have their roots in East Asia, and walked over the Bering Land Bridge when there was a frozen connection between (now) Russia and Alaska, new evidence has found that Native Americans and their ancestors have more European and Western Asian roots than Eastern Asian roots. This is not the result of interbreeding with Europeans that colonized North America in the 1500s and on.
Scientists sequenced the genome from a boy buried 24,000 years ago in Siberia (East Asia), and found part of his genome was only shared with Native Americans but no other group, and the other part was shared with Europeans and West Asians, but not with East Asians. It could be that the boy's group of people recently moved to Siberia and hadn't mixed with East Asians yet, then they interbred a bit and then migrated to North America. This research is being debated because it is based off a single skeleton, but is pretty cool nonetheless.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6157/409.full
Today's news (and this one is actually news from the past two weeks) is that although past research has generally shown that Native North Americans have their roots in East Asia, and walked over the Bering Land Bridge when there was a frozen connection between (now) Russia and Alaska, new evidence has found that Native Americans and their ancestors have more European and Western Asian roots than Eastern Asian roots. This is not the result of interbreeding with Europeans that colonized North America in the 1500s and on.
Scientists sequenced the genome from a boy buried 24,000 years ago in Siberia (East Asia), and found part of his genome was only shared with Native Americans but no other group, and the other part was shared with Europeans and West Asians, but not with East Asians. It could be that the boy's group of people recently moved to Siberia and hadn't mixed with East Asians yet, then they interbred a bit and then migrated to North America. This research is being debated because it is based off a single skeleton, but is pretty cool nonetheless.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6157/409.full