Danish scientists examined a bun of hair from an ancient Greenlandic and concluded that the first inhabitants of the North American Arctic were from North Asia, New Scientist reports
The discovery belongs to a group of scientists led by an anthropologist at the University of Copenhagen, Tom Gilbert.
The origins of the ancient inhabitants of the North American Arctic, known as Saqqaq - after the settlement where numerous archaeological finds were made - have long remained a mystery. They settled in what is now Greenland more than 4 millennia ago, and disappeared around 800 BC.
Archaeologists managed to find traces of settlements, skillfully made bone tools and very few human remains. As Gilbert noted, the question of where the bones of representatives of the Sakkak culture went is still unanswered.
Gilbert's colleague Eske Willerslev, who examined numerous animal bones in search of traces of human DNA, tried to unravel the mystery of the origin of the ancient Greenlanders. He failed to achieve success.
The situation changed when it became known that a Danish archaeologist in the 1980s discovered several scraps of ancient hair in Greenland, which were kept in a basement in Copenhagen to this day. Their study by modern methods has made it possible to determine the origin of the people of the Sakkak culture.
As it turned out, the owner of the hair came from the ancient inhabitants of Siberia. In addition, his relationship with the modern inhabitants of the Russian Commander Islands, located east of Kamchatka, was established.
At the same time, according to the characteristics of mitochondrial DNA, the ancient Greenlander was noticeably different from the ancestors of the American Indians who settled the continent at least 14 thousand years ago, and the Eskimos who settled in the Arctic region of North America about a thousand years ago.
Based on the discovery, Gilbert's group suggested that the people of the Sakkak culture came to the North American Arctic along a special migration route that lay through Beringia - the isthmus that connected Asia and America on the site of the present Bering Strait, and disappeared about seven thousand years ago.
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Gilbert also suggested that from Beringia to the north of America came other tribes related to the people of the Sakkak culture, some of these tribes were able to flourish, while others quickly died out. However, as pointed out by Michael Crawford, an anthropologist at the University of Kansas, additional data will be required to confirm Gilbert's theory.