Historical Melungeons: Today's Nature Publication Refutes Possibility of a Solutrean Migration to the Americas

Thursday, February 13, 2014

Today's Nature Publication Refutes Possibility of a Solutrean Migration to the Americas

A very exciting and definite paper has just been published by Nature, today, titled “The genome of a Late Pleistocene human from a Clovis burial site in western Montana,” by Rasmussen et al. The authors conclude that the DNA of a Clovis child is ancestral to Native Americans. Said another way, this Clovis child was a descendant, along with Native people today, of the original migrants from Asia who crossed the Bering Strait.

All four types of DNA were tested; Y chromosome, mtDNA, autosomal and X. Everything tested as having come through the Bering Strait from Asia. There was no European admixture.

This information is very important to a number of academic disciplines. I am sure much more remains to be explored and explained, but we can rest assured in this fact:

"The researchers concluded that the Clovis infant belonged to a meta-population from which many contemporary Native Americans are descended and is closely related to all indigenous American populations. In essence, contemporary Native Americans are “effectively direct descendants of the people who made and used Clovis tools and buried this child,” covering it with red ochre.

Furthermore, the data refutes the possibility that Clovis originated via a European, Solutrean, migration to the Americas."