A near-complete 12,000-year-old skeleton has been hailed as a ‘missing link’ between thee first inhabitants of America and modern Native American populations. Anthropologists have long puzzled over why modern Native Americans don’t look like their early ancestors. The skeleton of a teenage girl, dubbed Naia, found in 2007 in a now-flooded cave system in Mexico where she fell to her death thousands of years ago, has provided a possible answer. Despite Naia’s skull having a narrow face and low, flat nose that researches described as “about the opposite of what Native Americans look like today”, her mitochondrial DNA was found by scientists, in a report published May 15 , to match that of modern-day populations. This evidence links the skeleton and Native American populations to the same Ice Age migration across the Beringian land bridge that once connected Asia with North America. Changes in how Native Americans look would, therefore, appear to be due to in situ evolution and genetic drift, rather than separate ancestry as had been theorized. Credit: YouTube/Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia
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