Ancient DNA Sheds New Light on Arctic's Earliest People

The earliest people in the North American Arctic remained isolated from others in the region for millennia before vanishing around 700 years ago, a new genetic analysis shows. The study, published online Thursday, also reveals that today's Inuit and Native Americans of the Arctic are genetically distinct from the region's first settlers.

Inuit hunters in the Canadian Arctic have long told stories about a mysterious ancient people known as the Tunit, who once inhabited the far north. Tunit men, they recalled, possessed powerful magic and were strong enough to crush the neck of a walrus and singlehandedly haul the massive carcass home over the ice. Yet the stories described the Tunit as a reticent people who kept to themselves, avoiding contact with their neighbors.

Many researchers dismissed the tales as pure fiction, but a major new genetic study suggests that parts of these stories were based on actual events.

In a paper to be published Friday in Science, evolutionary geneticist Eske Willerslev and molecular biologist Maanasa Raghavan, both of the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and their colleagues reveal for the first time that the earliest inhabitants of the Canadian Arctica group that archaeologists call the Paleo-Eskimoslived in isolation from their neighbors for nearly 4,000 years, refraining from any mixture with Native Americans to the south or with the ancestors of the modern Inuit.

"Elsewhere, as soon as people meet each other, they have sex," says Willerslev. "Even potentially different species like Neanderthals [and modern humans] had sex, so this finding is extremely surprising."

The new study also proposes a previously unknown migration. Research by other scientists has shown that the first Americans entered the New World at least 15,500 years ago, and that two smaller migrations of hunter-gatherers from Asia followed. The new study indicates that the Paleo-Eskimos entered the Arctic some 5,000 years ago, in a separate migration.

Only One Woman?

Moreover, the team's analysis of the diversity in maternally inherited DNA in their samples suggests that these Paleo-Eskimo migrants included extremely few women. Indeed, it's possible there was just one adventurous female among the founding population. "I can't remember any other group having such low diversity," says Willerslev.

Geneticist and anthropologist Jennifer Raff, at the University of Texas, Austin, who was not a member of the team, thinks the new analysis is a major step forward in Arctic studies.

"This research has answered several important questions about North American Arctic prehistory," she says. The study now shows, for example, that the Paleo-Eskimos arrived separately from the ancestors of the Inuit, and remained genetically distinct.

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Ancient DNA Sheds New Light on Arctic's Earliest People