Genetic Study Reveals the Existence of a Previously Unknown Group of Hunter-Gatherers in Siberia 10,000 Years Ago
The spread of modern humans in the world is a mystery scientists have been trying to solve for decades. For a long time, they have understood that the resolution of this puzzle involves the understanding of the prehistoric human population and their ultimate fate. One of these groups became the focus of the study published in the journal Current Biology.
For the study, experts took into consideration the genomes of ten individuals who lived in North Asia around seven millenniums ago. The findings backed the previous assertion that humans came from Asia to the Americas and also indicated that there was a backward movement. This implied that there was a back-and-forth shift going on in the prehistoric human population of that time.
The genome analysis showcased a group of prehistoric hunter-gatherers that inhabited North Asia around 10,000 years ago. This early Holocene Siberian people inhabited the Neolithic Altai-Sayan region. The Altai region has previously been the site of discovery for remains of the archaic hominin group, the Denisovans. It has been noted by the researchers that the area witnessed population movement between places like northern Siberia, Central Asia, and East Asia.
The population's genetic data implied that they were descendants of both paleo-Siberian and Ancient North Eurasian (ANE) people. "We describe a previously unknown hunter-gatherer population in the Altai as early as 7,500 years old, which is a mixture between two distinct groups that lived in Siberia during the last Ice Age," said Cosimo Posth at the University of Tübingen, Germany, and senior author of the study, stated Science Daily. "The Altai hunter-gatherer group contributed to many contemporaneous and subsequent populations across North Asia, showing how great the mobility of those foraging communities was."
DNA of these early Holocene Siberian people was noted in many later groups across North Asia, ranging from the Bronze Age to the present day. This reflected the mobility of this foraging community. Researchers noted multiple instances of gene flow from North America to Asia throughout the past five millennia. Genes from the New World were spotted in Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula on the Pacific Ocean and central Siberia. This was a breakthrough finding for experts.
"While there has been a lot of work showing flows of genetic ancestry into the Americas, there has been less evidence for backflow from the American continent to Eurasia," said Vagheesh Narasimhan, a geneticist at the University of Texas at Austin, who did not participate in this study, stated Live Science. "This work presents a new sample from northeastern Asia to support these results."
Researchers were most surprised by the remains that were spotted in Nizhnetytkesken Cave in the Altai. The individual was donning a religious costume and was surrounded by artifacts that were indicative of him being a shaman. Analysis revealed him to be 6,500 years old and a contemporary of this newly revealed group with links to groups in the Russian Far East. "This implies that individuals with very different [genetic] profiles were living in the same region," Study lead author Ke Wang, a junior professor in anthropology and human genetics at Fudan University in China shared. "His grave goods appear different from other archeological sites, implying mobility of both culturally and genetically diverse individuals into the Altai region." Such findings indicate that prehistoric human populations were more connected than previously believed.