Since the 1960s, archaeologists have debated the origin of ancient arctic peoples and their migration paths to the New World. The North American Arctic was one of the last major regions to be settled by modern humans who crossed over from Siberia to the Arctic via the Bering Strait. This region offers a rich archaeological history documenting populations of people that relied on different kinds of stone tool technology, lived in various types of dwellings and depended on animals such as seals, walrus and caribou for survival. However, little is known about how the first arctic cultures, namely Paleo-Eskimos, Native Americans and ancestors of modern-day Inuit, travelled and interacted with one another. Where did they come from? Did they come in several waves? When did they arrive? Who are their descendants? And who can call themselves the indigenous peoples of the Arctic?
The answers to these questions have long been considered the “holy grail” of Arctic archaeology. That grail has now been discovered by an international team of scientists who analyzed 169 samples of ancient bone, hair and teeth from Arctic archaeological sites ranging from Siberia to Greenland. The results, published in the August 29 issue of Science are a stunning achievement of new DNA technology that reveal a new, separate migration of Siberian peoples into the Americas about 6,000 years ago.
The international team of scientists included lead author Maanasa Raghavan and Ekse Willerslev from the Natural History Museum of Denmark, archaeologist William Fitzhugh from the National Museum of Natural History and colleagues. Here’s what they found:
- For the first time, separate origins of Arctic populations were demonstrated based on genomic as opposed to cultural data. Scientists confirmed that a distinct Paleo-Eskimo population with origins in eastern Siberia colonized and occupied the Eastern Arctic for nearly 5,000 years and was replaced by the Thule culture whale hunters (the immediate ancestors of the Inuit in Canada and Greenland) with little evidence of mixing between the two groups.Both of these groups appear to have different origins in Eastern Siberia.
- Paleo-Eskimo culture and people survived many climate shifts, population displacements and diseases by relying on flexible and resilient social and economic adaptations.
- Paleo-Eskimo and Thule Eskimos/Inuit in North America show no evidence of significant genetic contact with American Indians, Greenland Norse or other Europeans. Some previous DNA studies had identified American Indian genetic heritage for some Eskimo groups.
- Current theories of the peopling of the Americas call for three basic migration waves into the Arctic. However, this new study reveals that there were two biologically distinct Eskimo migrations into the North American Arctic, an earlier Paleo-Eskimo wave followed by the Thule migration.
The arrows represent two waves of migration into the North American Arctic by Paleo-Eskimos and the ancestors of the Inuit in Canada and Greenland. For more information, read the paper in Science.
This study—as thorough as it is—is only an opening chapter in the genetic history of the North American Arctic. More work will be needed to parse out additional details about the gene flow of early groups in Alaska, the Eastern Arctic and Greenland to better understand the lives of these people in their Arctic world.
By Dr. William Fitzhugh, Curator of Archaeology and Director of the Arctic Studies Center at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History