Summary of Origins of the first Americans

00:00:00 - 00:30:00

The video discusses the origins of the first Americans and how researchers believe that the people who lived in Beringia (a land bridge that connected Siberia to Alaska) were trapped on ice and were eventually replaced by other groups. There is still much debate among archaeologists about the migrations of the first Americans, but the findings of genetic studies support the theory that some of the people who lived in Beringia migrated south to Chile and other parts of South America.

• 00:00:00 The two girl children, Sunrise Girl Child and Dawn Twilight Child, were discovered in a secret burial pit in 2013. Their remains were partially cremated and covered in red ochre, which suggests they were wrapped in shrouds. It is possible they were twins and their brief lives ended approximately 11,500 years ago. The children were discovered in the upward sun river site in the tanana river valley of Central Alaska. Their timeline was constructed based on evidence such as the position of their bodies and the fact that the hearth had been built and used long before they died. The first to be interred was the partially cremated fetus, and then every indication is that the pit was immediately filled back in with sediment and the bones of their meals. The hearth was used for another season or two before the three-year-old upward sun river mouth child was cremated atop the hearth and then buried. It is surprising that these behaviors have not been seen in similar situations before, as this is a unique funerary practice that shows no real connection to the other burial sites that have been discovered in North America.
• 00:05:00 The video investigates the origins of the first Americans, with the focus on their social traditions and inferred cultural heritage. It is argued that these insights imply that the first Americans were a newly discovered separate culture, even though Sunrise Girl and Dawn Twilight Child were buried first. The burial pit was discovered in 2013 and the remains of the infants were revealed beside them, including stone tools and other grave goods that date back to the earliest known North American hafted by face stone spear points with decorated antler foreshafts. These spears must have been valuable to a hunter-gatherer society, and their inclusion in the grave reveals how much losing these children meant to the culture. However, what makes the discovery of Sunrise Girl and Dawn Twilight Child Girl even more significant is that they still possessed something that the charred bones of Upward Sun River Mouth Child did not--recoverable DNA that identifies them as members of a paleo-indian population that no longer exists. Researchers argue that these children were descendants of the first wave of settlers who crossed the Bering Land Bridge perhaps 20,000 years ago. These bands eventually followed channels from north to south that cleared of ice and crossed all of North America, Central America, and South America, but it all began around 47,
• 00:10:00 The first Americans are believed to have arisen in central Asia, and their mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) indicates that they share a single ancestor who arose in central Asia. However, x haplogroup has no presence in modern East Asians, and this has led to various models attempting to explain how haplogroup x migrated across Asia, Europe, and the Americas. However, apart from a few curious atypical bones and a similarity between prehistoric European stone tools and those found in Clovis New Mexico, the mitochondrial DNA evidence has not convinced the academic community of any prehistoric migration across the Atlantic. However, other researchers have made connections between the first Americans and populations that ended up in western Asia and Europe. Meet the Malta boy: beginning in the 1920s, the Malta site near the shores of Lake Baikal was extensively studied. A young boy's skeleton was stored in museum collections for decades before Eska Villerslev and his team were able to sample mitochondrial and y-chromosome DNA from within an upper arm bone. He was between three and four years old at the time of his death, and had brown hair, dark eyes, and freckles. His lineages seemed all wrong at first, but eventually researchers found that he was more
• 00:15:00 The video discusses the origins of the first Americans and how researchers believe that the people who lived in Beringia (a land bridge that connected Siberia to Alaska) were trapped on ice and were eventually replaced by other groups. There is still much debate among archaeologists about the migrations of the first Americans, but the findings of genetic studies support the theory that some of the people who lived in Beringia migrated south to Chile and other parts of South America.
• 00:20:00 The video discusses evidence that suggests three migrations of humans occurred in North America. The first migration, known as the paleo Indian, was associated with the greatest distribution of language and cultural groups across North America. The second migration, the nadene migration, occurred 12-14 thousand years ago and was distributed in North America from Alaska to the Pacific Northwest and from Canada to the US Southwest. The third migration, the Eskimo Alut, occurred circa 9000 years ago and had a circumpolar distribution. Linguists have classified Eskimo Aleut and Nadene as separate language stocks, and the rest of the languages of the Americas as belonging to numerous stocks. However, they have been mostly silent on questions that connect Asian and American populations because the dates of these earlier connections lie beyond the traditionally accepted limit for comparative reconstruction. The term Eskimo is problematic on a number of levels and continues to be used within an historical linguistic, archaeological, and cultural context. The yenisei river is a region in Siberia whose language families spread to northern China and Central Asia in Paleolithic times. One hypothesis for their success when all other language and ethnic groups were erased over 10,000 years ago is that they were able to survive along the swampy verge of the yen
• 00:25:00 The video shows Trace DNA which indicates that people likely followed the Pacific coast to the south between 15 and 17,000 years ago. There is also the "kelp highway" hypothesis which has studied the possibility that the rich kelp forests of the Pacific coast could have easily sustained a migratory population during this time. If coastal populations with the same genetic background it did come down the coast first, the walking migrants might have met their distant cousins in the river deltas and watersheds of the north American and south American west coast. However, so far mitochondrial and autosomal DNA neither supports nor rejects that supposition. Mangy Ren was female, lived approximately 14,000 years ago, and belonged to a maternal haplogroup descended from the M9 lineage, which connects her to the lineages who originally populated the Americas. Two models fit the data that they discovered: one that like the DNA of Sunrise Girl, this is an example of a remnant population left behind by migrants who found success elsewhere, or it might be that this is an example of a coastal population who had already been to the Americas and returned all the way back to southern China. If true, this might indicate a surprisingly high level of travel along the north Pacific coasts over thousands of years. So
• 00:30:00 This video investigates the origins of the first Americans, who are believed to have arrived in North America around 12,000 years ago. It discusses the evidence for this claim and highlights the importance of archaeological research in understanding the history of the continent.