Altai in southern Siberia sits right at the centre of Russia. But the tiny, mountainous republic has a claim to fame unknown until now - Native Americans can trace their origins to the remote region.
DNA research revealed that genetic markers linking people living in the Russian republic of Altai, southern Siberia, with indigenous populations in North America.
A study of the mutations indicated a lineage shift between 13,000 and 14,000 years ago - when people are thought to have walked across the ice from Russia to America.
Altai in Siberia: A study of genetic markers in DNA showed that the lineage of Native Americans changed around 13-14,000 years ago - when people are thought to have walked across the Bering Strait
This roughly coincides with the period when humans from Siberia are thought to have crossed what is now the Bering strait and entered America.
'Altai is a key area because it's a place where people have been coming and going for thousands and thousands of years,' said Dr Theodore Schurr, from the University of Pennsylvania in the US.
Among the people who may have emerged from the Altai region are the predecessors of the first Native Americans.
Roughly 20-25,000 years ago, these prehistoric humans carried their Asian genetic lineages up into the far reaches of Siberia and eventually across the then-exposed Bering land mass into the Americas.
'Our goal in working in this area was to better define what those founding lineages or sister lineages are to Native American populations,' Schurr said.
'Our goal in working in this area was to better define what those founding lineages or sister lineages are to Native American populations,' Schurr said.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2092258/Native-Americans-actually-came-tiny-mountain-region-Russia-DNA-research-reveals.html#ixzz1kbO2uDKL
To be continued tomorrow
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