Here is one intriguing tweet:
Wllierslev: 24,000-yr-old Siberian Mal'ta person geneticall similar to native amer and west eurasians. No east asian #paleoamericanodysseyand another:
Willerslev: Native Americans formed by an admixture of east Asian ancestors and the ancestors of western Eurasians #paleoamericanodysseyand another:
Willerslev: Based on genomes, "the Mal'ta is much darker if you want than the iceman (Otzi)" #paleoamericanodysseyI'll be occasionally looking at the #paleoamericanodyssey tag, but feel free to point to any other interesting tweets from the conference in the comments.
From the Met:
The Mal'ta tradition is known from a vast area spanning west of Lake Baikal and the Yenisey River. The site of Mal'ta, for which the culture is named, is composed of a series of subterranean houses made of large animal bones and reindeer antler which had likely been covered with animal skins and sod to protect inhabitants from the severe, prevailing northerly winds. Among the artistic accomplishments evident at Mal'ta are remains of expertly carved bone, ivory, and antler objects. Figurines of birds and human females are the most commonly found items.From a review article:
Debetz (1946) identified the remains of “nothern Asian Mongoloids” at the site ofUPDATE (Oct 26):
Afontova Gora 2; they included a fragment of the frontal bone. Mongoloid features had
been originally acknowledged in the skeletal remains of a child found at the site of
Malta. Alexeev (1998, 323) in his later publication was more cautious, stating that this
area was “inhabited by a population of Mongoloid appearance.”
Michael Balter has an article on this topic in Science:
Yet the child's Y chromosome belongs to a genetic group called Y haplogroup R, and its mitochondrial DNA to a haplogroup U. Today, those haplogroups are found almost exclusively in people living in Europe and regions of Asia west of the Altai Mountains, which are near the borders of Russia, China, and Mongolia.This suggests that the Mal'ta boy was not ancestral to Native Americans (since Native Americans don't possess Y-haplogroup R and mt-haplogroup U), although obviously is in some way related to them based on the autosomal evidence. It's hard to read between the lines, but I guess a paper in Nature will come out soon enough as it is currently "in press".