During the last ice age, when hunters and gatherers crossed the ancient Bering Land Bridge that connected Asia with North America, they carried something special with them in their genetic code: pieces of ancestral Australian DNA, a new study finds.
Over the generations, these people and their descendants trekked southward, making their way to South America. Even now, more than 15,000 years after these people crossed the Bering Land Bridge, their descendants — who still carry ancestral Australian genetic signatures — can be found in parts of the South American Pacific coast and in the Amazon, the researchers found.
“Much of this history has unfortunately been erased by the colonization process, but genetics is an ally to unravel unrecorded histories and populations,” study senior researcher and professor Tábita Hünemeier and study co-lead researcher and doctoral student Marcos Araújo Castro e Silva, both of whom are in the Department of Genetics and Evolutionary Biology at the University of São Paulo in Brazil, told Live Science in an email. Read more.
Just from a quick glance around, gradual expansion from various populations living on and traveling to-and-from ice sheet islands seems more plausible for North America than Bering Land Bridge.
mountainsmoke So zero evidence of that DNA in North America, but yet somehow they traveled through it? Must have just ran for the south…
This DNA evidence does not track with the Bering Land Bridge theory at all..