Scientists attempting to map out the historical migrations of North and South America by analysing ancient bones have revealed that a 10,000-year-old skeleton unearthed in a cave in Nevada is the ancestor of a Native American tribe.
The iconic skeleton, known as the “Spirit Cave mummy”, was reburied this summer by the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone people in Nevada, bringing closure to a decades-long legal dispute with anthropologists who fought for it to remain on display in a museum.
DNA painstakingly extracted from the ancient skull proved the skeleton was an ancestor of the tribe and discredited a longstanding theory that the individual was from a group of “Paleoamericans” that existed in North America before Native Americans.
The full genetic details of the skeleton, which is the world’s oldest natural mummy, are published as part of a wide-ranging international study of the ancestry of North and South America. The project also found evidence of two previously unknown migrations into South America and revealed surprising traces of Australasian ancestry in indigenous South Americans that hint at a far earlier arrival of modern humans to the Americas – potentially dating back 30,000 years or more.
Prof Eske Willerslev, who led the sequencing of the Spirit Cave Mummy and helped interpret genetic data from dozens of ancient specimens spanning about 10,000 years and locations from Alaska to Patagonia, said the findings highlighted the “power of ancient DNA” to reveal untold stories of the distant past.
Willerslev, who holds positions at the University of Copenhagen and the University of Cambridge, attended the reburial of the mummy this summer, which he said involved crying, singing and prayers. The mummy was placed in a casket and people were invited to place farewell gifts alongside it; Willerslev added a box of snuff tobacco.
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