Category Archives: Transhuman News

DNA from the remains of a toddler buried 12,600 years ago in southwestern Montana confirm that the prehistoric Clovis people were the ancestors of American Indians, researchers said.

About 80 percent of all present-day indigenous people in North and South America are direct descendants of the family of the child, a 1-year-old boy, according to a paper published today in the journal Nature. The other 20 percent are more closely related to the Clovis than any other people on earth.

Debate about the origin of Americas native people has persisted for decades. Some scientists suggested the Clovis people were a migration of Europeans who used similar-looking tools about 21,000 to 17,000 years ago. Todays finding shows this notion can no longer be treated as a credible alternative for Clovis (or Native American) origins, said Jennifer Raff, a research fellow in anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin, in an editorial published with the study.

The neat part is that it confirms so many hypotheses, including the Native American understanding of where they came from, Raff said.

While the study suggests the Clovis were the first native people to establish themselves in the Americas, they werent the first humans to set foot on the continents. The Clovis arose after people arrived in America by way of the Siberian land bridge in the last ice age, which started 25,000 years ago, though they didnt descend from Europeans, Asians, or Melanesians, the scientists said.

The boys mitochondrial DNA, inherited from his mother, belongs to one of the founder lineages that was carried by the first people who crossed from Siberia. Though the sequence is rare in present-day American Indians, it was common among the oldest inhabitants of the Americas.

Comparing his genome show he is most closely related to American Indian populations, and more related to Siberians than any other Eurasian.

This discovery basically confirms what the tribes have never doubted: weve been here since time immemorial, and the objects in the ground are from our ancestors, said Shane Doyle, a member of the Crow tribe, a historian at Montana State University and a study author.

The Clovis people, known for their distinctive spear points were first identified in 1932, near Clovis, New Mexico. The child whose genome was sequenced was buried with about 120 artifacts in Montana, a site discovered 46 years ago. He was covered in red ochre, probably as part of a funeral, and was buried with a number of spear points that predate him, suggesting they were ritual objects or heirlooms. Its not clear how he died, the researchers said.

The study is also unusual, in that it enlisted consultants to present-day Montana tribes. The researchers plan to rebury the boy where he was found in late spring or early summer. The scientists traveled to local tribes to tell them about their discoveries and consult with them about how best to continue their research, Doyle said.

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DNA Shows Clovis People as Ancestors to Native Americans

DNA harvested from the remains of an infant buried 13,000 years ago confirms that the earliest widespread culture in North America was descended from humans who crossed over to the New World from Asia, scientists say.

The research, detailed in this week's issue of the journal Nature, also suggests that many contemporary Native Americans are direct descendants of the so-called Clovis people, whose distinctive stone tools have been found scattered across North America and Mexico.

The origins and genetic legacy of the people who made Clovis tools have been topics of debate among scientists. While most archaeologists think that the Clovis people were descended from Asians, an alternative theory suggests that the Clovis ancestors emigrated from southwestern Europe during the Last Glacial Maximum more than 15,000 years ago.

The new findings strongly refute that idea, known as the Solutrean hypothesis, said study co-author Michael Waters, director of the Center for the Study of the First Americans at Texas A&M University. "This shows very clearly that the ancestry of the very first Americans can be traced back to Asia," Waters said.

David Anderson, an anthropologist at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, agreed. "There's been a standard model for a long time that modern Native Americans are descended from populations coming from East Asia a few thousand years before Clovis, and that's what this finding reinforces," said Anderson, who was not involved in the study.

Anthropologist Dennis Jenkins of the University of Oregon said the new study was a "really important and really well done piece of research" that opens the door for new kinds of genetic comparisons among ancient Native American remains.

"The importance of this cannot be overemphasized," said Jenkins, who also did not participate in the research.

"People have often asked me what's the relationship of the Paisley Caves"a site in Oregon where human feces and artifacts up to 13,200 years old have been found"to Clovis, and I've always said that would be really nice to know, but there hasn't been any Clovis DNA until now," he said.

Oldest Burial in North America

The skeleton of the Clovis childwhich experts determined belonged to a young boy about one to one-and-a-half years oldwas discovered in 1968 in the Anzick burial site in western Montana. Dozens of ochre-covered stone tools found at the site were consistent with Clovis technology, and radiocarbon dating revealed that the skeleton was approximately 12,600 years old.

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Oldest Burial Yields DNA Evidence of First Americans

Human bones found in isolated bushland on Queensland's Sunshine Coast almost certainly belonged to murdered schoolboy Daniel Morcombe, a court has heard.

However, the exact cause of the 13-year-old's death couldn't be determined, the trial of his accused killer Brett Peter Cowan was told on Wednesday.

Jurors heard of the massive bushland search in the Sunshine Coast hinterland that uncovered more than a dozen partial bones and a pair of boy's shoes in August and September 2011.

Forensic crime scene manager Inspector Arthur Van Panhuis said police divers, State Emergency Service (SES) volunteers, scientific experts and cadaver dogs were involved in the search of an old sand mine, a macadamia farm and bushland near a creek at the Glass House Mountains.

Inspector Van Panhuis said metal detectors, sieves and an excavator were also employed in the meticulous hunt, in which 500 cubic metres of sand was shifted.

'It was an extremely intensive search,' he told the Supreme Court in Brisbane.

A boy's shoe was found within four days and within a month police had recovered a second shoe and 17 partial bones belonging to a human aged in their early teens.

DNA from an upper arm and thigh was compared with DNA from Daniel's mother and brothers.

'It was an exact match,' microbiologist Dr Dadna Hartman told the court.

Forensic pathologist Dr Peter Ellis who conducted the autopsy agreed with crown prosecutor Glen Cash that it was impossible to determine the cause of death.

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Bone DNA matched Daniel's mum

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Human bones found in isolated bushland on Queensland's Sunshine Coast almost certainly belonged to murdered schoolboy Daniel Morcombe, a court has heard.

However, the exact cause of the 13-year-old's death couldn't be determined, the trial of his accused killer Brett Peter Cowan was told on Wednesday.

Jurors heard of the massive bushland search in the Sunshine Coast hinterland that uncovered more than a dozen partial bones and a pair of boy's shoes in August and September 2011.

Forensic crime scene manager Inspector Arthur Van Panhuis said police divers, State Emergency Service (SES) volunteers, scientific experts and cadaver dogs were involved in the search of an old sand mine, a macadamia farm and bushland near a creek at the Glass House Mountains.

Inspector Van Panhuis said metal detectors, sieves and an excavator were also employed in the meticulous hunt, in which 500 cubic metres of sand was shifted.

'It was an extremely intensive search,' he told the Supreme Court in Brisbane.

A boy's shoe was found within four days and within a month police had recovered a second shoe and 17 partial bones belonging to a human aged in their early teens.

DNA from an upper arm and thigh was compared with DNA from Daniel's mother and brothers.

'It was an exact match,' microbiologist Dr Dadna Hartman told the court.

The rest is here:
Bone DNA matched Daniel's mother