Is China the origin of the Native Americans?

A team of archaeologists discovered a large set of bones from about 14,000 years ago in a cave in southern China's Yunnan province more than three decades ago. Among the remains was a skull with a rare mix of archaic and modern features. Its shape resembled that of Neanderthals and its brain seemed to be smaller than that of modern humans.They were called the 'red deer men', after the extinct animal they fed on. Now, for the first time, researchers have successfully sequenced the genome of these ancient Pleistocene fossils from ancient DNA extracted from the skull. The work, published Thursday in the journal Current Biology, suggests that the mysterious hominid belonged to an extinct maternal lineage of a group of modern humans that could have contributed to the origin of Native Americans.Their current descendants are found in East Asia, the Indochina peninsula and the islands of Southeast Asia. "The ancient DNA technique is a really powerful tool," says Bing Su of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and an author of the study. He tells us definitively that the red deer »were modern humans rather than an archaic species, such as Neanderthals or Denisovans, despite their unusual morphological features,« he explains.

American natives

The team compared the genome of these fossils with that of people from around the world. He discovered that the bones belonged to an individual who was deeply linked to East Asian Native American ancestry. Combined with data from earlier research, this finding led the team to propose that some individuals from southern East Asia had traveled north along the coast of present-day eastern China via Japan and reached Siberia tens of thousands of years ago. They then crossed the Bering Strait between the continents of Asia and North America and became the first people to reach the New World.(Article excerpted from ABC Science illustration by XUE PIN-JI)