Native Americans may have originated from China, says new study on 14,000-year-old human fossils

The journal “Current Biology” published the study on July 14, which stated that the discovered fossils are thought to belong to an extinct maternal branch to which Native Americans are also possibly related.

Researchers compared the genome of the bones to people from around the world and came to the conclusion that they matched those of an individual deeply linked with East Asian ancestry.

Archaeologists had previously found fossils in China’s Yunnan Province three decades ago; however, it was not until 2018 that a team was able to extract DNA from the ancient skull and use genome sequencing to prove that the individual belonged to an extinct species of modern humans whose descendants were now in East Asia, the Indo-China peninsula and the Southeast Asian islands.

By Jane Nam