Origins of the first Americans: Before and after the Anzick genome

ABSTRACT

Recent analyses of the preserved ancient genomes of the Mal’ta boy and Anzick infant have transformed our understanding of Native Americans’ origins. The Mal’ta genome shows that about one-third of Native American genetic ancestry is derived from admixture, about fifteen to twenty thousand years ago, of East Asians with a now-vanished population of interior southern Siberia. Living Native Americans are demonstrably the direct descendants of the people who made and used Clovis tools and buried the Anzick infant in Montana ca. 12,800 cal B.P. The profound implications of these data for the origins of the first Americans should be obvious. However, as evidenced by the books reviewed here, archaeologists appear largely unaware of these data and their now-standard but unsubstantiated narratives of pre-Clovis coastal migrations remain unaffected.

KEYWORDS:

• Anzick
• Clovis
• first Americans
• pre-Clovis

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Notes on contributors

Stuart J. Fiedel

DR. STUART FIEDEL earned his BA in Anthropology at Columbia University, and his doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania in 1979. His original specialty was the Neolithic archaeology of the Near East. Since 1986, Dr. Fiedel has been working in cultural resource management archaeology; since 2001 he has been a senior archaeologist with Louis Berger US. Dr. Fiedel published Prehistory of the Americas (Cambridge University Press) in 1987; a revised second edition came out in 1992, and a Spanish translation in 1996. He has also published numerous articles on diverse topics in New and Old World archaeology, including radiocarbon calibration, megafaunal extinctions, the origins of the European Neolithic, Algonquian languages and migrations, and Paleoindians.