This week, two teams of scientists released reports detailing the origins of Native American peoples. Both groups looked at ancient and modern DNA to attempt to learn more about the movements of populations from Asia into the New World, and about how groups mixed once they got here. Both discovered a hint that some Native Americans in South America share ancestry with native peoples in Australia and Melanesia.
But the two groups came to different conclusions when it came to how that DNA with ties to Oceania made its way into the Native American genome.
In a wide-ranging paper in the journal Science, University of Copenhagen Centre for GeoGenetics Director Eske Willerslev and coauthors studied genomes from ancient and modern people in the Americas and Asia.