Why does native americans look asian

The oldest known genome of a modern human solves long-standing puzzles about the New World's genetic heritage. The results show that people related to western Eurasians had spread further east than anyone had suspected, and lived in Siberia during the coldest parts of the last Ice Age.

This mixing, he says, created Native Americans — in the sense of the populations of both North and South America that predated — as we know them.

His team's results are published today in Nature 1. The team found that DNA from the boy's mitochondria — the energy-processing organelles of living cells — belonged to a lineage called haplogroup U, which is found in Europe and west Asia but not in east Asia, where his body was unearthed.

The result was so bizarre that Willerslev assumed that his sample had been contaminated with other genetic material, and put the project on hold for a year.

Instead, it must reflect an ancient ancestry. The two groups mingled, and their descendants eventually travelled east into North America. This new origin story helps to resolve several peculiarities in New World archaeology.

For example, ancient skulls found in both North and South America have features that do not resemble those of East Asians. They also carry the mitochondrial haplogroup X, which is related to western Eurasian lineages but not to east Asian ones. On the basis of these features, some scientists have suggested that Native Americans descended from Europeans who sailed west across the Atlantic.

These features make sense when you consider that Native Americans have some western Eurasian roots. Raghavan, M. Download references. You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar. What's next? Share Tweet Email. Read This Next Wild parakeets have taken a liking to London. Animals Wild Cities Wild parakeets have taken a liking to London Love them or hate them, there's no denying their growing numbers have added an explosion of color to the city's streets. India bets its energy future on solar—in ways both small and big.

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Paid Content How Hong Kong protects its sea sanctuaries. But while non-mixing appeared to be the general pattern after dispersal, the researchers found two striking exceptions. One shows a North-South re-mix, and the other a West-East re-mix.

In the North-South re-mix, it looks like there was some back-migration from South America northwards, and this is reflected in the genomes of Central American Chibchan-speakers, which contains DNA from two widely separated strands of Native ancestry.

The analysis was not straightforward, because the researchers had to find a way to rule out genes from the European and African populations that arrived in the Americas from the late 15th century onwards.

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The mutation can lead to many health conditions. Niemann-Pick disease is a rare genetic disorder that renders the body incapable of metabolizing cholesterol and other lipids inside cells. There is….