LIVINGSTON, Mont., Feb. 12 (UPI) -- DNA from a Montana burial site suggests many contemporary American Indians are direct descendants of the ancient Clovis people of the U.S. West, scientists say.
Clovis culture, with its distinctive stone tools, dates to around 12,600-13,000 years ago. The name comes from the fact the first such tools were found at sites near Clovis, N.M., in the 1920s and 1930s.
Although Clovis sites are considered the oldest widespread archaeological complex in North America, the origins and genetic legacy of the people who manufactured Clovis tools has remained uncertain, researchers said.
It has generally been held the Clovis people ultimately derived from Asia and were directly related to contemporary American Indians, but an alternative theory has suggested Clovis predecessors emigrated from southwestern Europe during the Last Glacial Maximum.
Writing in the journal Nature, U.S. and Danish researchers report the first complete genome sequence of an ancient North American individual -- an infant boy whose skeleton was discovered at a burial site in western Montana along with dozens of distinctly Clovis stone tools.
It indicates the child belonged to a population from which many contemporary American Indians descended and is closely related to all indigenous American populations, they said.
The finding is a strong challenge to the hypothesis the Clovis culture originated via a European migration to the Americas, they said.
