Sunday, May 24, 2020

Out there in the cold

Forgive my excursions into Fantasy Archipelago last week. I was aiming to keep each set of musings into the same batch of blogposts. Anyway just because I was off, doesn't mean the anthropologists were. Now we've got news from Lake Baikal: "Paleolithic to Bronze Age Siberians Reveal Connections with First Americans and across Eurasia" (doi 10.1016/j.cell.2020.04.037), from under the delightfully-named chief author He Yu.

As the press releases have it, Lake Baikal in 12000 BC looks populated by the same crew as populated the Americas. This is before Clovis. But it's also after when the Americas were supposed to be populated.

This implies that the founding population of the Americas mixed and formed in Siberia, and not in Alaska. That tribe also survived in Siberia for thousands of years. Modern Siberians have, since, taken on a lot of East Asian DNA.

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