[....] “If you read about the origins of Native Americans, it will say East Asians somehow crossed the Bering Sea,” said study author and evolutionary biologist Eske Willerslev at Copenhagen University. “This is definitely not the case — it’s more complex than that.”

Originally excavated in the 1950s, the remains of the boy had been tucked away in the bowels of a museum in St. Petersburg. He was about 3 when he died, and he was buried with a variety of “grave goods,” including a swan figurine and an ivory pendant.

When Willerslev sequenced the DNA from the boy’s upper arm bone, he thought the results were a mistake: It said the boy belonged to a lineage commonly found among Europeans, but not in East Asians.

“We put the study on hold for a year because I thought it was contamination,” Willerslev said.

They tried again, this time digging deeper and looking at the Y chromosome. It and the rest of the genome told the same story: The boy had links to present-day western Eurasians and Native Americans, but not East Asians.

They also sequenced a more recent Siberian adult whose DNA wasn’t as well preserved, and they got similar results.

“They were members of a really cosmopolitan group that probably reflect early modern humans leaving Africa and spreading into central Asia,” said study author Kelly Graf, a Texas A&M anthropologist [....]

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DNA indicates Eurasian roots for Native Americans, new study says
By Meeri Kim, Washington Post, November 20, 2013