Baker reported that the biological evidence "simply does not match up" with archeological finds. Native Americans may not have originated in Japan as previous archaeological evidence has suggested, according to a new study of ancient teeth.
For years, archaeologists had predicted that the first people to live in North America descended directly from a group called the Jomon, who occupied ancient Japan about 15,000 years ago, the same time people arrived in North America around 15,000 years ago via the Bering Land Bridge, a strip of land that previously connected Russia to North America before sea levels rose above it. This theory is based on archaeological similarities in stone tools, especially projectile weapons, found in Native American and Jomon settlements.
However, the authors of the new study say this scenario is highly unlikely because the biological evidence "simply does not match up" with the archaeological findings, according to a statement from the researchers.
"The Jomon were not directly ancestral to Native Americans," lead author G. Richard Scott, an anthropologist at the University of Nevada, Reno, told Live Science. "They [the Jomon] are more aligned with Southeast Asian and Pacific groups than with East Asian and Native American groups."
Instead, the researchers suspect that Native Americans descended from a different group living somewhere in East Asia, although a lot of uncertainty remains about exactly where and when those ancestors lived.
"Ancestors of Native Americans were likely stalled out in Beringia during the late Pleistocene [when ice sheets and glaciers would have trapped them] until conditions improved enough to allow travel down the west coast of North America," Scott said. "And during this period of isolation, they differentiated from ancestral populations in East Asia."
However, recent findings, including the discovery of footprints in New Mexico dating as far back as 23,000 years, have called into question exactly when people arrived in North America, Live Science previously reported. "Unfortunately, we cannot address this issue with the data at hand," Scott said.
The study was published online Oct. 13 in the journal PaleoAmerica.
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