Ancient Beringian

The Ancient Beringian (AB) is a special group of people whose ancestors lived a very long time ago. We know about them because scientists studied the DNA of an infant found at a place called the Upward Sun River site, which is about 11,500 years old.

This group of people is important because it helps us understand how the first people came to live in the Americas. Their ancestors separated from other Native American groups about 20,000 years ago. These early people were part of a bigger group called Ancestral Native American, which mixed with people from East Asian and Ancient North Eurasian groups.

Their story tells us about the amazing journey of people moving from Asia to the Americas during a time when much of the world was covered in ice, called the Last Glacial Maximum. Learning about the Ancient Beringian helps us learn more about the history of all Native American people today.

Research

The Ancient Beringian lineage is no longer found in modern indigenous people in Alaska. A study from 2018 suggests that this lineage was replaced or mixed with a group called "North Native American" (NNA) when they moved back to Alaska. Today’s Athabaskan people come from a mix of this NNA group and a Paleo-Siberian lineage, happening around 2,500 years ago.

Researchers discovered this lineage by studying the remains of two female infants found in 2013 at the Upward Sun River site. This site is linked to the Denali Complex, an ancient culture in the American Arctic. Scientists at the Centre for Geogenetics at the University of Copenhagen’s Natural History Museum of Denmark analyzed the DNA of one of the infants, named USR1. Their findings were shared in the journal Nature in January 2018. The study showed that the Ancient Beringian lineage came from earlier groups and stayed in Alaska for thousands of years before mixing with other lineages.