A new analysis of ancient DNA has revealed important information about the lifestyles of the people who lived in Central and South America, including Belize. A team from Harvard University were successfully able to analyze DNA from archeological sites across the region, including some that is 11,000 years old, to better understand how the Americas were first populated. Previously, DNA analysis was only able to successfully identify genomic information from samples that were just a few hundred years old. But a new technique developed at Harvard Medical School allowed researchers to show that the so-called Clovis culture expanded much more rapidly than originally believed.
Currently, the prevailing archeological theory is that human beings crossed from what is now Siberia into the northernmost part of the Americas via a land bridge during the last Ice Age. This migration is called the “Clovis culture” after the town of Clovis, New Mexico where ancienthuman-made tools were discovered in the 1920s. Archeologists then assumed that the Clovis culture slowly expanded southward, taking several thousand years to reach what is now Tierra del Fuego in Argentina and Chile.
The Harvard Medical School team in conjunction with the Max Planck Institute, the University of California-Santa Cruz, Pennsylvania State University, the University of Sao Paulo, and the University of New Mexico obtained permits to analyze ancient human remains from across the Americas in order to compare them with the DNA of modern peoples living in Central and South America.
Published in the journal Cell, the new research helps close the so-called Clovis “gap” and prove that the Clovis people were living in Belize 11,000 years ago, several thousand years earlier than previously assumed. The “gap” refers to a lack of fossil or archeological evidence to conclusively prove the existence of the Clovis culture in places like Belize earlier than 9,000 years ago. The ancient DNA analyzed by the team conclusively proved that members of the Clovis culture share the same DNA as living people in modern Belize and other areas of Central and South America as well as matching to known ancient Clovis culture samples.
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