The 11,500-year-old skeleton of a 6-week-old girl found buried on a bed of antler points and red ocher offers genetic clues to how people arrived in the Americas.
     Discovered in Alaska in 2010, an international team of scientists reports the child's genome is second-oldest human genome ever found in North America. Analysis shows the child belonged to a previously unknown lineage that split from other Native Americans either just before or soon after they arrived in North America.
     Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen, a co-author of the new study, says: "It's the earliest branch in the Americas that we know of so far."
     The study strongly supports the idea that the Americas were settled by migrants from Siberia. Indications are these early settlers endured for thousands of years before disappearing.

Edited from The New York Times (3 January 2018)