Telltale HairGreenland's First Settlers
Gene in hair traces past
Hair preserved in permafrost for 4,000 years has shed light on a tribe of Stone Age hunters who crossed from Siberia to Greenland in an unsung odyssey of migration. Unearthed at a site in western Greenland, the hair provides a vivid portrait of a man who died four millennia ago and overturns a mainstream theory about how humans colonized the Arctic New World. Greenland's first known settlers were not Inuit or Native Americans as widely believed, but the direct descendants of Siberians who somehow crossed the Bering Strait to Alaska and then headed east. The tuft of hair and four pieces of bone, uncovered at coastal-dwelling community, are the only human remains ever found that lived in western Greenland for some 1,700 years. Living on harp seals and fish and other marine food, the culture disappeared around 800 BC. A research team of University of Copenhagen teased out nearly 80 percent of the genetic code and identified variations in DNA showing signs of body characteristics that surprisingly matched the man's genome against those of people alive today. Anthropologists have long surmised that the first settlers to North America had either walked across the strait while it was iced over during the winter months, or crossed it by boat, perhaps using the Aleutian islands as stepping stones. These pioneers then headed south, with their descendants eventually arriving in the southern tip of South America thousands of years later. Until now, Greenland was believed to have been settled by populations that headed there after prolonged settlement in the New World, such as Na-Dene people of North America, or the Inuit of the Arctic. But the recent research proved it to be wrong.
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