Member No.: 3 Joined: 20-November 07 |By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY|
11 July 2012 Native Americans streamed into the New World in at
least three waves of migration starting more than 15,000 years
ago, a gene study released Wednesday suggests. North and South
America were totally empty of people until the first arrivals
from Siberia crossed a land bridge into Alaska, spreading in a
few thousand years to the tip of South America. The genetic
study may help settle a debate between a long-held view that the
peopling of the continents came as one event instead of the more
recently supported notion, backed by this study in the journal
Nature, that the migration happened in three distinct waves. .
"Our study makes clear that mixing of these three ancient
populations is the story of Native American arrival," says
geneticist David Reich of Harvard Medical School, lead author of
the study. It finds a "First American" wave starting more than
15,000 years ago that first moved into North and then South
America from Asia. Migr