New World's Oldest Skeleton Is a Key Genetic Link

Remains Found in Mexico Connect Earliest Settlers With Continent's Natives

By Robert Lee Hotz, WSJ
Updated May 15, 2014 7:15 p.m. ET

She was just a teenager when she died alone in the dark.

The scientists who analyzed her bones said Thursday that she is the oldest nearly complete, genetically intact human skeleton in the New World. Her remains—discovered deep within a flooded cave in Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula—cement the connection between the earliest settlers of the Americas and modern Native Americans.

A unique genetic marker exhumed from her 12,000-year-old skeleton offers evidence that the first hunter-gatherers who crossed the Bering Sea from northeast Asia on a now-submerged territory called Beringia belonged to the same population group as many Native Americans today, the scientists said.

"It is a lineage we see across the Americas," said anthropologist Deborah Bolnick of the University of Texas at Austin, who helped analyze maternal DNA extracted from a tooth taken from the skeleton.

The international team of 16 anthropologists, geneticists and cave divers reported their findings Thursday in the journal Science.

(More here.)