Scientists Found Human Remains With DNA That Don't Match Other Humans

Scientists Found Human Remains With DNA That Don’t Match Other Humans

NEW YORK – About 6,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers who migrated south settled in the Bogotá Altiplano of what is now Colombia, transitioning to an agricultural society over the next 4,000 years. Then they vanished.

Whoever these people were, they disappeared from the genetic record. The team of researchers who discovered them through fragmented DNA in their skeletal remains have not been able to find any ancient relatives or modern descendants.

They are strangely not related to Indigenous Columbians, having more of a connection to people who now live on the Isthmus of Panama and speak Chibchan languages. It could be possible that they spread through the region, mixing with local populations for so long that their genes were diluted, but no one can be sure.

Genetics tell the story of how the Americas were populated by the ancestors of modern Indigenous people. Their origins lie in Siberian and East Asian groups who are thought to have first mixed 20,000 years ago, during the Late Paleolithic, later crossing a bridge of ice to North America some 16,000 years ago.

It was then that this lineage split into northern Native American and southern Native American lines. While the northern Native American ancestry is mostly made up of populations that stayed in North America, three more lineages branched into southern Native American ancestry, which would reach further south.

“The Isthmo-Colombian area, stretching from the coast of Honduras to the northern Colombian Andes, is critical to understanding the peopling of the Americas,” the researchers said in a study recently published in Science Advances. “Besides being the land bridge between North and South America, it is at the center of the three major cultural regions of Mesoamerica, Amazonia, and the Andes.”

Each southern Native American lineage can be traced back to its earliest ancestors. There is one line descending from the Anzick-1 individual discovered in 1968, when construction workers unearthed the 12,700-year-old skull of a child belonging to the Clovis people, one of the earliest known peoples in the Americas.

This young boy is related to modern Indigenous people from North, Central and South America. Another lineage that is found in the Central Andes comes from ancient people living in California’s Channel Islands. Yet another lineage, also descended from the Clovis population, is associated with the oldest Central and South Americans from Belize, Brazil and Chile.

When exactly these populations appeared in Central and South America is still mostly unknown, but they must have arrived by traveling over the land bridge that connects the southernmost part of Central America to the South American subcontinent. There is also a linguistic connection. Speakers of Chibchan languages share some genetic and cultural aspects with the mysterious people who cannot be traced directly to any population.