Part 3; America Before: The Key to Earth’s Lost Civilization....Siberia...Hall of Records...The Strange and Mysterious Genetic Heritage Of Native Americans

America Before: The Key to Earth’s Lost Civilization.

By Graham Hancock

Genes

The Mystery in DNA

7 

SIBERIA 

ACROSS BOTH SOUTH AND NORTH America DNA studies have revealed that at some point in the remote past, in some unknown location or locations, the ancestors of Native Americans interbred with an archaic—and now extinct— human species. Only recently discovered, and closely related to the more famous Neanderthals who also produced offspring with our ancestors, geneticists have named this species “the Denisovans.” Insufficient sampling has been done to establish exact levels but the current estimate is that 0.13 to 0.17 percent of Native American DNA is of Denisovan origin 1—with indications in the data that some indigenous groups, for example, the Piapoco of Colombia and Venezuela in South America and the Ojibwa of northeastern North America, can be expected to have higher levels of Denisovan DNA than others.2 

We know about the Denisovans because of paradigm-busting discoveries at the eponymous Denisova Cave in a region of rugged highlands known as the Altai at the extreme south of the Russian Federal District of Siberia. Bordered by Mongolia, China, and Kazakhstan, and extending from the Ural Mountains in the west to the Kamchatka Peninsula and the federal district of Chukotka more that 5,000 kilometers to the east,3 Siberia covers 13.1 million square kilometers—around 77 percent of the total geographical area of Russia. The Urals form a prominent part of the dividing line between Europe and Asia. Kamchatka and Chukotka stand at the junction of the Pacific and  Arctic Oceans, with Kamchatka’s coast washed by the waters of the Bering Sea while Chukotka commands the Bering Strait. 

Presently 82 kilometers wide between Cape Dezhnev in Chukotka and Alaska’s Cape Prince of Wales, during the last Ice Age the Strait was drained by lowered sea levels and a tundra-covered land bridge—“Beringia”— connected Chukotka with Alaska. In other words, at that time, Europe, Asia, and the Americas were one continuous landmass. Should you have had the inclination and the stamina, there were certain periods when it would have been technically possible to walk from the Atlantic coast of what is now Spain, across western and eastern Europe to the Urals, through the Urals, through Siberia, across “Beringia,” into Alaska and Canada, down through the “ice-free corridor” dividing the two primary sheets of the North American ice cap, into the United States and thence through Central America into South America as far as Tierra del Fuego before again encountering another ocean —a narrow one during the Ice Age when Antarctica was much larger.4 

No investigation of the human story in the Americas, therefore, can ignore the role of Siberia as a crossroads in the migrations of our ancestors. Moreover, despite the fact that only a tiny fraction of its vast area has yet been sampled by archaeologists, we already know that anatomically modern humans were present in both western and Arctic Siberia at least as far back as 45,000 years ago.5 We know, too, that DNA studies have revealed close genetic relationships between Native Americans and Siberians that speak to a deep and ancient connection.6 

ANOMALIES IN THE DATA 

WITH A FEW NOTABLE EXCEPTIONS, 7 it was the consensus view of archaeologists and anthropologists during the period of “Clovis First” dominance that the Americas were settled exclusively by the overland route from Siberia via “Beringia” and southward through the ice-free corridor. Despite the collapse of “Clovis First,” this remains the consensus view today; however, it has been finessed to accommodate the discovery of ever more sites in North and South America predating the opening of the ice-free corridor that therefore could not possibly have been settled by migration through it.8 In addition, several subsequent studies have pointed out that for much of its duration long stretches of the supposed ice-free corridor would have been completely uninhabitable and thus most unpromising territory for a lengthy migration.9 

To explain how migration might have taken place at all, therefore, and to account for the growing mass of archaeological and genetic evidence suggesting that humans had been in the Americas, isolated from Asia, for thousands of years before Clovis, two theories have recently found favor: 

1. A “Beringian standstill” model (within which scholars continue to debate) whereby, in the simplest terms, having crossed the land bridge into Alaska perhaps as much as 30,000 years ago, the migrants found their southward progress blocked by the conjoined Cordilleran and Laurentide Ice Sheets. More or less simultaneously their return to Siberia was interdicted by the expansion of glaciers in Siberia’s Verkhoyansk Range and in Alaska’s Mackenzie River Valley.10 Their descendants were therefore obliged to spend between 10,000 and 20,000 years stranded in Beringia before further climate shifts allowed them to spread south into the Americas. During this “incubation period” the now isolated population experienced certain genetic changes that would distinguish them from their northeast Asian ancestors at the level of DNA while at the same time confirming their close ancestral relatedness.11 

2. A “coastal migration” theory whereby the first migrants were boat people who crossed the narrow island-strewn neck of the North Pacific from northeast Asia into the Americas.12 This coastal theory 95 relies heavily on the so-called Kelp Highway migration model, which notes that the deglaciation of North America’s Pacific Coast presented migrants with a region rich in kelp and other aquatic resources that could support their journeys. The coastal model also relies on the unarguable presence, though scarce, of early Paleolithic northwest American archaeological sites. Such coasting could have been undertaken at any time during lowered Ice Age sea levels, particularly when Beringia was exposed, could have been achieved with extremely simple technology such as rafts and coracles, and often would not have required the migrants to lose sight of land. Since we know that other ancient peoples migrated by sea as much as 65,000 years ago—for example, the crossing of the Timor Straits by the first migrants to Australia 13—there can be no objection in principle to the Americas being inhabited in the same way. 

All this seems thoroughly reasonable and I have no doubt that both things happened. Island-hopping migrants in simple vessels suitable for short open water crossings did indeed contribute significantly to the peopling of Americas. Similarly, one need look no further than Jacques Cinq-Mars’s excavations demonstrating a human presence 24,000 years ago at Bluefish Caves in the Yukon to confirm that there is truth to the Beringian Standstill model, too.14 

But are these revised and finessed models, currently very much in vogue with archaeologists, sufficient to explain all the complexities and anomalies in the data that science offers on the peopling of the Americas? 

SERGEY AND OLGA 

IN EARLY SEPTEMBER 2017, A couple of months before visiting Topper with Al Goodyear and a month before meeting Tom Deméré at The Nat in San Diego, Santha and I applied for Russian visas and declared our destination as Denisova Cave in the Altai. 

The visas were expensive, the dauntingly opaque application forms took a great while to fill out, and in the general fog of bureaucratic time-wasting we began to wonder if we might have to postpone the trip until the spring of 2018 when the Siberian winter would have come and gone. Russia is more efficient than it looks, however, and we had our visas within a week. 

Still, it was going to have to be a very quick visit with a big American journey planned from the end of September through until close to the end of November. There was no time for sightseeing, therefore, when we flew to Moscow on September 12, overnighted at Sheremetyevo, and caught a connecting flight the next morning to Novosibirsk, the Siberian capital, a four-hour flight and four time zones east of Moscow. 

After landing and collecting our bags Santha and I were met groundside by our local connection, Sergey Kurgin. I say “connection” because you have to have one if you’re going to travel in Russia. You can’t just get up and go. Some solid citizen, or business, or tour operator must take responsibility for you and officially invite you, and you must have a prearranged and pre-planned itinerary to pre-approved destinations or your visa won’t be issued —nor, if you somehow manage to slip through the net, will any hotel accommodate you on your route. 

Sergey owns a small private travel business called Sibalp, and I’d contacted him on the internet to help set up the trip. Negotiations were complicated by the fact that he spoke no English—he was perplexed that I spoke no Russian—but various translators got involved and a deal was done. Sergey would drive us the 600 kilometers or so from Novosibirsk to Topolnoye, a township in the Altai, where we would stay with a local family 97 while we visited the cave about 20 kilometers farther on. When we were done he would drive us back to Novosibirsk. He would arrange all accommodation en route and find us an interpreter, without whom we would be unable to speak to anyone. Joining Sergey at the airport to meet us, therefore, was Olga Votrina, the bilingual student from Novosibirsk State University who’d be interpreting for us. 

Novosibirsk is a city of monotone drabness with an oppressive, regimented, Soviet-era feel to it. Olga was cheerful and nervous, wanting very much to be a good interpreter and guide. Thickset and grizzled, Sergey was an older man perhaps in his seventies, but solid, gruff, and strong. He owned a four-wheel-drive Mitsubishi minivan that had at some point been imported, used, from Japan and thus had its steering wheel on the wrong side. It was battered and creaky with a pronounced and disconcerting tug to the right, but as he drove us through the geometric grid of Novosibirsk’s streets, Sergey assured us it was up to the journey ahead. 

Our hotel was in the academic quarter, a stone’s throw from the Museum of the Peoples of Siberia. We spent the following morning viewing artifacts from Denisova Cave, and in the afternoon we set off on the long road south beneath leaden, wide-open skies across a remarkably flat landscape relieved by patches of muted color—black earth here, green field there, rank upon rank of hay bales set upon yellowing stubble marching toward the remote horizon. There was something lulling and dreamlike about the whole scene; I drifted off to sleep and when I awoke, darkness had fallen. 

Sergey was downing a can of Red Bull and gripping the juddering wheel tightly as he weaved in and out of the surprisingly heavy Siberian traffic. Despite his disadvantageous position on the wrong side of the road he was doing well and by midnight we had two-thirds of the journey behind us and stopped to sleep in the town of Biysk. 

We were back on the road again early the next morning—a much brighter and more cheerful day—and drove 65 kilometers farther south to Belokurikha, near which there were rumored to be some intriguing megaliths that Sergey believed he would be able to locate.15 Quite different from the flatlands of the day before, we were now on the borders of the Altai Mountains, and spent the next several hours in the region of Mt. Mokhnataya 16 driving off-road through fields, circling likely looking hills covered in outcrops of granitic rocks, and asking farmers for directions. Eventually we met a man who knew a man who knew the couple, Vladimir Illych and Raisa Stepenov, both in their late sixties, who were said to have discovered the alleged megaliths. An hour later we were sharing bread and honey with them in their home in the village of Nizhnekamenka. This was followed, quaintly, by a tour of their vegetable garden and an invitation— how could we refuse?—to pick raspberries and blackberries from the briars growing in abundance there. 

It was early afternoon by the time Vladimir and Raisa, their daughter Svetlana, and their strapping young grandson Maxim all crammed into Sergey’s groaning minivan with us. It seemed we had been in roughly the right place all morning, missing the site only by about half a mile. I was excited that we were finally going to see it, but as we set out again on the bumpy off-road drive Vladimir advised me to lower my expectations. In his opinion the media coverage had been much ado about nothing and the so-called megaliths he was about to show us were natural rock formations. 

BEHIND THE HEADLINES 

THE INFORMATION THAT THERE MIGHT be ancient megaliths here in the Altai, quite close to Denisova Cave, had come to me by way of a news item in the English-language edition of The Siberian Times published on May 8, 2017. The rather compelling headline reported the discovery of “Dragon and Griffin Megaliths” dating back to the end of the Ice Age.17 “Archaeological researchers” named Aleksandr and Ruslan Peresyolkov were cited suggesting the enigmatic monuments were likely to be at least 12,000 years old but that precise dating would be impossible until “the culture that created them is identified.”18 

This is always a problem with monuments carved out of stone. The cutting and shaping of the stone itself cannot be directly dated. What is needed is an archaeological context in which the monument is set—preferably with carbon-datable organic materials in situ—and from these the age of the monument may then usually be inferred. Since there was no excavation at Mt. Mokhnataya, however, no context had yet been established and the  archaeological researchers were surely right that precise dating was presently impossible. 

But what sort of “archaeological researchers” had even these provisional assessments reported in The Siberian Times come from? The news item gave no information about their credentials, nor could I find any online. The only clue, and not necessarily a reliable one, was in the comments section where Ruslan Peresyolkov was described as “a little-known web-designer and not an archaeologist (not even an amateur).” 19 

We humans are hardwired for pattern recognition, so it’s not surprising that people all over the world frequently detect patterns in nature that they believe are the work of men but later, on closer examination by cooler and more experienced heads, prove to be entirely natural. This happens particularly often with eroded outcrops of rock, notably with certain types of granite that can crack and weather in ways that seem obviously designed but in fact are not. 

Archaeologists are trained to be skeptical of such simulacra and their default position will be that a rock is just a rock until there is really hard and compelling evidence that humans shaped it. Needless to say, if the rock in question ended up as a granite statue of Ramesses II, the context and the style, plus any hieroglyphs engraved upon it, would tell you all you need to know. Granite boulders that have been sitting on an unexcavated hillside in the Altai for unknown thousands of years, however, are an entirely different proposition, and I wasn’t inclined to take any opinion of them on trust whether expressed by a fully qualified archaeologist or by a web designer or, for that matter, by Vladimir. 

I was just curious, and literally “in the area”—so why not take a look for myself? 

MESSAGES OF EARTH AND SKY 

WE DROVE AS CLOSE AS possible to a rugged hill that I recognized from our earlier search, and trudged across a field to get to it. Raisa, who’d recently had hip replacement surgery, remained behind in the Mitsubishi, but Vladimir, Svetlana, and Maxim joined us—the young man kindly offering to carry Santha’s weighty bag of cameras. 

We reached the base of the hill and began a long clamber up a steep slope thickly carpeted with wild grasses, heather, and clinging brambles. Svetlana warned us that the area was infested with snakes. “Always look before you step,” she said. 

The afternoon was sunny and surprisingly warm and the sky an eggshell blue with a few soft white clouds up high. At one point, pausing for breath, I turned and looked back. Behind us, dotted with lower mounds and hills, was a patchwork quilt of greens and yellows spread out for 20 miles across the floor of a glorious valley. It was through this valley and around these hills that we had spent the morning fruitlessly driving. Now, from this new vantage point, I saw it was bounded to the east by the humped, tawny backs of a distant range of mountains. I watched for a moment the shadows of the clouds painting their own patterns across the landscape, struck by the poignant, fleeting beauty of it all. 

We resumed the climb, close now to our first objective—an outcrop of rough, deeply fissured and fractured natural granitic bedrock, visible because the otherwise omnipresent undergrowth could find no purchase on it. It was red-gray in color, about 50 meters in length and 20 wide, obviously an integral part of the hillside itself, sloping at the same steep angle and surmounted at its upper end by a dense cluster of large boulders. “The tail of the dragon,” said Vladimir skeptically, pointing to the downslope sector of the outcrop, “and the head”—he indicated the boulders. 

At first I didn’t get it, but once we’d climbed above the outcrop and could look back and down on it, a figure began to emerge. I could just about make sense of the tail and I could see the head clearly—but not as the head of a dragon. Viewed very slightly turned in profile from where I stood it seemed to me much more to resemble the head and the left eye of some great serpent. 

I was, of course, already sensitized and preconditioned to recognize the form of a serpent in the outcrop, perhaps a little by Svetlana’s warning of snakes in the grass in these parts but also, in an even more visceral way, by what I had learned at Serpent Mound in Ohio. 

The “language” that Serpent Mound speaks is hard to understand from the technological-materialist point of view. That view, so dominant and widespread today, is one in which there is no such thing as “spirit” and the earth is simply dead “matter” to be mined, exploited, and consumed. By contrast the ancient people to whom Serpent Mound addressed itself in clear and ringing tones not only knew that all things, both animate and inanimate, were imbued with spirit but also lived close to the earth and were in touch with Her rhythms and awake to the manifold messages and signals and ciphers by which She spoke to them. 

Among these were perfectly “natural” features of the landscape through which, whether on account of their special appearance, or location, or alignment, or some other remarkable quality, the spirit of the earth could manifest wisdom, beauty, and teachings. Serpent Mound is one of these “Manitou,” and we saw how the presence there of a natural serpentine ridge, with a natural serpentlike “head” oriented toward the setting point of the sun on the summer solstice, offered an epiphany to the ancients of the union of earth and Sky and was their cue to create the great effigy mound that now commands the site and still “swallows the sun” on the longest day of the year. 

Nearly 3 months had passed since that summer solstice at Serpent Mound. Now the autumn equinox was just a few days away and I was very far from America, yet in a part of the world directly linked to the migrations of the ancestors of the First Americans. I was therefore not averse in principle to considering the possibility that this peculiar formation in the Siberian Altai might be another “Earth Serpent,” enhanced and embellished by human beings attentive to the ciphers of nature. 

But it equally might be how Vladimir saw it—simply one of those accidents of nature that give the illusion of a human hand at work. 

From the rough bearings I was able to take, though I offer no guarantees, it seemed to me that the serpent’s head (I could not see it as a “dragon!”) was oriented more or less due west and thus aligned to the setting point of the sun on both the spring and the autumn equinoxes. About 2 meters high and 4 meters long to the base of the neck, the head was massive and possessed a distinct brow ridge overlying the firmly defined left eye. Moving forward, I saw the mouth was present, the jaws clearly demarcated and slightly ajar. 

There was a peculiar cleft in the front of the lower jaw.  

Much of this, apart from that odd gap, was moderately serpentlike—but only on the left side of the serpent’s head. When I scrambled around to view the right side it was as though I were suddenly looking at a completely different structure—not a serpent at all but a megalithic wall built from ten hefty eroded but precisely interlinked granite blocks. Somehow, whether by nature or by human beings, a structure had been created that appeared to be a wall on one side and the head of a serpent on the other. 

If this was done by humans, I reasoned, then surely they would have wanted to make both sides look the same? 

On the other hand, if it was done by nature, how were we to account for the blocks—and, even more difficult—the combination of blocks and serpent simulacrum? 

Either on its own might be explained by weathering, but for both to occur together in such a limited area seemed much less likely. 

A few hundred meters farther up the hill the so-called griffin shed no greater light on the problem. Another rocky outcrop was involved, this time oriented south, and into its granite face, 3 meters tall from the base of its neck and 5 meters wide from the tip of its beak to the crest on the back of its head, was carved the likeness of some immense, mythical, hook-beaked bird— hence its designation as a “griffin.” 

Natural? Or modified by human hands? 

An argument against it being man-made is the way that the lower part of the beak is unfinished and unseparated from the surrounding bedrock. An argument in favor of human enhancements of the natural bedrock is that directly beneath the crest are three small alcoves set side by side step fashion. It is difficult to envisage how nature alone could have achieved this effect. And, besides, there are similar rock-hewn structures in the high Andes of South America that are indisputably man-made. 

As we climbed back down the hill Vladimir remained unpersuaded but I wasn’t so sure and a few days later, after returning to Novosibirsk where we had access to fast internet again, I searched for information about the region’s snakes. 

What I learned was that there are six species of serpent in the Altai and that the largest, most venomous and most respected of these by far is Gloydius halys, the Siberian pit viper. 

In my opinion it's clearly defined eyes, its brow ridges, the general shape of its head, and the way that its forked tongue is sometimes thrust out, allowing it to hang down over the middle of its lower jaw creating the illusion of a cleft in that jaw are all rather closely mimicked by the granite features of the “Earth Serpent” we trudged up and down that hill in the Altai to inspect. 

But does that make it a remnant of a megalithic Ice Age civilization? Or even a megalith at all? Certainly not! And the same goes for the “griffin.” Yet they are set in the heart of a region of mystery where previously held certitudes about humanity’s past have been shattered by the discoveries at Denisova Cave. 

After saying our good-byes to Vladimir, Raisa, Svetlana, and Maxim, as evening fell over that sunny Siberian day, we drove the remaining 80 kilometers south to Topolnoye, only 20 kilometers from the cave. There another friendly, down-to-earth couple waited to welcome us into their home and feed us not only bread and honey but milk fresh from the cow and other delicious, nourishing things.

ENTERING THE DENISOVANS’ 

SECRET VALLEY 

OUR NEW HOSTS WERE PAPIN Asatryan, dark-haired and bearded, a migrant to the Altai from Armenia when it was still part of the former Soviet Union, and his blond Siberian wife, Elena Darenskikh. They were both in their fifties, their children long ago grown up and fled the nest. Like most of the other 1,100 inhabitants of Topolnoye they had regular jobs (Papin was a builder, Elena an accountant), but also owned a few cows and goats and a fair-sized vegetable garden, growing enough food, it seemed, to make them self sufficient in most essentials. 

That night over a fantastic dinner I joked that if twenty-first-century civilization were to collapse it would be people like Elena and Papin who would survive—not people like me who’ve never hunted a deer or grown a cabbage or milked a cow in their lives. 

“Don’t worry,” Elena said, “we will save you!”

Some eye-watering local vodka was served, followed by a surprisingly comfortable night’s sleep on bunk beds and a sunlit morning greeted with an ample breakfast of eggs, bread, jams, fruit, coffee, and a jug of clotted cream. Then Sergey fired up the Mitsubishi and we were off along a reasonably good road, graded but not paved, running beside the Anui River, fast-flowing with patches of white water, reminding me of the trout streams my grandfather used to fish in the Scottish Highlands where I would sometimes accompany him when I was a child. 

For Santha the landscape had more of a “Tolkienesque” quality. Guarded by distant, soaring peaks, we were in a deep, hidden valley, sometimes darkly shadowed and enclosed, sometimes opening out suddenly and unexpectedly into undulating hills and hummocks where coppices of mixed autumnal woodland overlooked bright meadows at the river’s edge.

For geologists the landform here is known as “karst,” a special type of topography created by the random dissolution over millions of years of soluble, usually sedimentary rocks—in this case limestone. Like all such landscapes it is characterized by extensive underground drainage systems, sinkholes, and caves, of which Denisova Cave is just one among many. Some are already known to contain ancient human remains and artifacts, but far more have not yet been properly studied, or studied at all, by archaeologists. 20

Sergey pulled the Mitsubishi over and parked beneath a freshly minted National Monument sign, painted brown and helpfully labeled “Denisova Cave” in both Russian and English. Narrow here between low banks, the river was behind us, forested to its edge on the far side and with a saw toothed range of mountains rising in the distance beyond. On our bank the trees had been cleared and in front of us, across the road, rising steeply for about 200 meters, was a grassy slope with a wooden stairway constructed on its upper part leading to a rugged silver-gray karst cliff at the base of which gaped the black, almost square mouth of the cave. 

It is, arguably, the most important archaeological site in the world, and yet not a soul was here, not a scientist, not a tourist, not even a guard. The whole place was eerily deserted, silent but for birdsong and the gentle rustle of wind through the grass, marking time under the sun as it had done for millennia, the guardian of many mysteries still. 

Not that I minded the solitude and the peace. 

What a privilege, I thought, what a gift, to be here on this bright morning and to have this ancient place to ourselves.

8 

HALL OF RECORDS 

DENISOVA CAVE HAS HAD ITS modern name only since the early nineteenth century when a monk, Dionisij—Dennis—lived, meditated, and left his graffiti here. 1 Before that the peoples of the Altai used to call it Aju-Tasch, which means “Bear Rock.” 2 We have no idea how far that nomenclature may go back. It is certain, however, that Denisova Cave has been used and occupied by various species of human for at least 280,000 years, making it an unrivaled archive—a sort of “hall of records”—of our largely unremembered ancestral story. 3 Since excavations began in 1977 it has proved to be a gift that just keeps on giving as archaeologists have systematically combed out the secrets buried in its successive occupation levels. 4 

At the risk of stating the obvious, in an archaeological excavation through orderly and undisturbed stratigraphy of the kind that Denisova Cave generally exhibits, the upper levels are the youngest and the lower levels get progressively older the deeper down you dig. This, for example, is why archaeologists divide the period they call the Paleolithic (the “Old Stone Age,” dating from roughly 3 million years ago until 12,000 years ago) into the Lower, Middle, and Upper Paleolithic, with the latter conventionally dated between 50,000 and 12,000 years ago. 5 

The first two trenches at Denisova Cave, both 4 meters deep, sliced down through the more recent levels and exposed artifacts beneath them dating back to the Upper Paleolithic. In the decades that followed these deposits proved to be rich, various, and well preserved and the cave became 108 recognized as a prehistoric locality of great importance. 6 At certain times during the past 280,000 years, not continuously but at intervals, it had been occupied by Neanderthals 7—our extinct cousins with whom, as is now widely known, our ancestors interbred and from whom some extant modern human populations have inherited as much as 1–4 percent of their DNA. 8 Neanderthals were probably still using the cave 50,000 years ago. It wasn’t until 2010, however, when proof emerged that a human species hitherto unrecognized by science had been present at Denisova—a species now also known to have interbred with our ancestors 9—that the true global significance of this very obscure and remote place could begin to be fully realized. 

The sensational news was broken first in the pages of Nature in December 2010 in a benchmark paper, “Genetic History of an Archaic Hominin Group from Denisova Cave in Siberia.” 10 Coauthored by a stellar team of biomolecular engineers, geneticists, and biologists, with a couple of anthropologists and archaeologists thrown in for good measure, the paper announced the discovery of “the distal manual phalanx [i.e., the fingertip] of a juvenile hominin. … The phalanx was found in layer 11, which has been dated to 50,000 to 30,000 years ago. This layer contains microblades and body ornaments of polished stone typical of the ‘Upper Palaeolithic industry’ generally thought to be associated with modern humans.” 11 

The big surprise, however, following a thorough analysis of DNA from the fingertip, was that it didn’t belong to an anatomically modern human, nor a Neanderthal, but to a species that had diverged from the common lineage leading to anatomically modern humans and Neanderthals about 1 million years ago. This previously unknown species was judged to be “a sister group to Neanderthals.” 12 

PALEO-CSI 

DNA WAS ON MY MIND as we scrambled up to the cave because a good way to get to grips with the challenge of Denisova is to think of it as a crime scene— a very old, neglected, contaminated, and long-unrecognized crime scene from 109 which the physical evidence is mostly gone apart from a few bones and teeth but where just enough genetic material might remain to help us figure out what happened there. 

Nonetheless, from the moment I entered the cave it impressed itself upon me first, foremost, and forcefully, as a sacred and mystical space. It faced roughly west, overlooking the steep slope leading down to the Anui River, and that morning, as no doubt on many mornings over many thousands of years, the brightness of the day outside was reflected back through the entrance to illuminate the spacious “Main Gallery” within. Looking up I saw that a narrow natural window opened in the ceiling 10 meters above the gallery’s west side close to the entrance, admitting more light but also no doubt in ancient times serving as a chimney. 

I paused to breathe in the cave air, cool and moist, and to look around, struck by the way the bone-white walls, stained by lichen and covered in the ugly scrawl of recent graffiti that defaced almost every exposed surface, nonetheless gathered about themselves a kind of somber, ancient magnificence. The effect was enhanced by soaring archways leading into the smaller, more intimate East and South Galleries, the side chapels to this prehistoric basilica. I deploy the analogy deliberately because the Denisova Cave system does have a “cathedral-like” feel about it, but I do not claim that it was ever used for religious or spiritual purposes. It may have been, but what the mass of archaeological evidence suggests is that for extraordinarily long periods of time it functioned as a “factory” or “workshop,” and that raw materials were brought here from far-off places to be worked and fashioned. 

This became clear during the brief visit we made to the Museum of the Peoples of Siberia in Novosibirsk before setting out for Denisova Cave. Director Irina Salnikova apologized that there was so little for us to see in the Denisova room of her museum, explaining that much of the collection was away at exhibitions or in laboratories for further investigation. What she was able to show us, however, as well as many stone tools at various stages of refinement, from extremely primitive to sophisticated, were some unusual and beautiful pieces of jewelry including pendants featuring biconical drilled out holes, cylindrical beads, a ring carved from marble, a ring carved from mammoth ivory, and bone tubes perhaps designed to hold bone needles so they could be carried safely. 13

Many of the materials employed had been brought considerable distances to the cave, 14 and now that I had reached the cave itself I could see all three of the galleries in which they had been found and inspect the open excavation trenches with little tacks and tags left in place to mark the various occupation levels. It was the gaping rectangular trench in the center of the Main Gallery, however—I would guess it was 5 meters deep, 4 meters long, and 3 meters wide—that most clearly displayed Denisova’s amazing time machine of stratification, with distinct Ice Age occupation levels numbered from 9, 15 the youngest, all the way down to 20, the oldest, right at the bottom. 

The excavation had descended farther here, down to Level 22, but the tacks and tags for these last two lower and older levels, visible on early reports of the progress of archaeology in the cave, 16 were no longer present. According to studies undertaken by the excavators, man-made tools and artifacts were found in these two exceedingly ancient layers, dated by radio thermoluminescence to between 155,000 and 282,000 years ago. 17 “The lithic [stone] industries recovered from strata 22 and 21 are characterized by Levallois and parallel strategies of stone reduction; the tool kit is dominated by side scrapers and notch-denticulate tools.” 18 

I knew that artifacts together with Neanderthal and Denisovan remains had been recovered in the excavations in all three galleries across multiple Paleolithic occupation levels. That morning, however, my focus was particularly on Level 11 in the East Gallery, where certain unusual and distinctive tools and pieces of jewelry had been found. 

Some of these had the archaeologists scratching their heads. 

USUAL THINGS AND UNUSUAL THINGS 

ANNOYINGLY, I HAD BEEN UNABLE to view these special items during my visit to the Museum of the Peoples of Siberia. But I knew from my research that they’d been retrieved, together with other more “normal” and “usual” objects, from an almost exclusively Denisovan occupation level of the East Gallery, nominated Level 11 by the archaeologists and dated to the Upper Paleolithic between 29,200 and 48,650 years ago. 19 

After the first Neanderthal skeletal remains were identified in Europe in the nineteenth century it was, for a very long while, one of the fundamental unquestioned assumptions of archaeology, a matter taken to be self-evidently true, that other “older,” “less-evolved” human species never attained, or even in their wildest dreams could hope to aspire, to the same levels of cultural development as Homo sapiens. During more than a century of subsequent analysis, and despite multiple additional discoveries, the Neanderthals continued to be depicted as nothing more than brutal, shambling, stupid subhumans—literally morons by comparison with ourselves. 20 Since the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century, however, and with increasing certainty as the evidence has become overwhelming, a new “image” of the Neanderthals as sensitive, intelligent, symbolic, and creative beings capable of advanced thought processes and technological innovations has taken root among archaeologists and is set to become the ruling paradigm. 21 

There should be no objection in principle, therefore, to the notion that the anatomically archaic Denisovans, a close genetic “sister species” to the Neanderthals, might have been capable of creating the sorts of tools and symbolic artifacts that, a few decades ago, would automatically have been assumed to be the work of anatomically modern humans. 

Yet a difficulty arises. 

Among the more “unusual” and “unique” items excavated from the Paleolithic deposits within the entrance zone of the East Gallery, specifically from Level 11.1, 22 were two broken pieces of a dark green chloritolite bracelet. It would have measured 27-millimeter wide and 9-millimeter thick when intact, with an original complete diameter of about 70 millimeters. 23 A detailed use-wear analysis of the bracelet was undertaken and revealed something odd: “This artifact was manufactured with the help of various technical methods of stone working including those that are considered non-typical for the Paleolithic period. … The bracelet demonstrates a high level of technological skills.” 24 

In their detailed scientific analysis published in the journal Archaeology, Ethnology and Anthropology of Eurasia, A. P. Derevianko, M. V. Shunkov, and P. V. Volkov draw our attention, in particular, to “a hole drilled close to one of the edges” of the bracelet and report that “drilling was carried out with  a stable drill over the course of at least three stages. Judging by traces on the surface, the speed of drill running was considerable. Vibrations of the rotation axis of the drill are minor, and the drill made multiple rotations around its axis.” 25 

They therefore conclude that the bracelet “constitutes unique evidence of an unexpectedly early employment of two-sided fast stationary drilling during the Early Upper Paleolithic.” 26 

This is a big deal! 

What the investigators are getting at is how peculiar and misplaced in time the bracelet seems to be. It is not simply that it shows the application of skills and technologies that are “unique for the Paleolithic” 27 (i.e., to state the matter plainly, skills and technologies that had never before been seen in a Paleolithic context in any excavation) but also that at least some of these skills and technologies, like “stationary drilling” with the use of a bow drill that does not leave signs of drill vibration, 28 would not be seen again until the Neolithic many thousands of years later. The bracelet thus refutes what the authors describe as “a common assumption” held by archaeologists that “stone drilling originated during the Upper Paleolithic, but gained the features of a well-developed technology only during the Neolithic.” 29 

So not only was this curious bracelet unequivocally the work of anatomically archaic human beings—the Denisovans—but also it testified to their mastery of advanced manufacturing techniques in the Upper Paleolithic, many millennia ahead of the earliest use of these techniques in the Neolithic by our own supposedly “advanced” species, Homo sapiens. Also made crystal clear was the realization that the Denisovans must have possessed the same kinds of artistic sensibility and self-awareness that we habitually associate only with our own kind—for there can be no doubt that very real, conscious, aware, and unmistakably human beings had interacted with this bracelet at every stage of its conception, design, and manufacture, all the way through to its end use. 30 

Though the outward structure of Denisovan skulls might have been rather different from ours (predictable for a “sister species” to the Neanderthals), the sense of style, design, and personal adornment manifested in the bracelet seems completely modern, and archaeological reconstructions show it to have been a beautiful thing.

Its calculated diameter of just 70 millimeters when intact would have made it “practically impossible to put even the thinnest hand into it.”31 The most likely solution, however, since it undoubtedly was worn, is that this stone bracelet originally took the form of a torque—not fully circling the wrist, but with a section removed: “The tips of the bracelet were likely cone-shaped. Such a shape of the ends of the bracelet makes it easy to put on a hand tangentially. … Judging by the size of the artifact and the signs of extensive use-wear on the interior surface close to the end, the bracelet sat tightly on the wrist.”32 

These signs included evidence of “long contact of the interior surface with human skin”33 and, more intimately, “remains of … fat from human skin”34 —details that reach across the ages and forge a poignant sense of connection. Indeed it dilates the imagination to contemplate the identity of the person this bracelet was originally made for, who certainly—given the estimated diameter—must have had slim and graceful wrists to wear it well. It is unlikely to have been the property of a child because of its rarity, artistry, and high value. As the investigators report: “It brightly shimmers in broad daylight and reveals a rich play of hunter green shades in the light of a campfire. The bracelet was hardly an everyday item. Fragile and elegant, it was apparently worn on very special occasions. Given the utmost rarity of the material and the thorough finish, the bracelet was a prestigious ornament attesting to its owner’s high status.”35 

All in all, it seems a fair speculation that the slim-wristed person who owned this bracelet so many millennia ago was a woman. If so, whoever she was, whatever position of status she may have occupied, we can also guess  that she had quite an eye for beauty and a whimsical sense of style. A nice additional detail of the bracelet is that for a long while the drilled hole held a leather strap from which was suspended a pendant.36 Though neither the pendant nor the strap has survived, their presence left unmistakable polish marks around the hole: “The polished area is limited suggesting that the pendant was rather heavy and caused a strictly set amplitude of oscillation of the strap. The outlines of the polished area suggest the ‘up’ and ‘down’ sides of the bracelet and allow us to assume that the bracelet was worn on the right arm.”37 

Again, there is that sense of contact, of intimacy, as though we’re separated by no more than a hair’s breadth from this ancient human. It must be admitted, however, that even here we’re speculating. We might not be dealing with a single individual at all. The bracelet might instead have been a treasured heirloom, passed down from mother to daughter across many generations. 

Whatever the truth is, it was eventually broken—not once but twice. On the first occasion the break was evidently accidental and it must still have been cherished because it was carefully repaired, literally put back together again, with some effective but as yet unidentified form of glue.38 

The second occasion was very different. It appears that the bracelet was deliberately smashed—we can only guess at the motive—“by a blow against a hard surface.”39 

THE EYE OF THE NEEDLE 

THE LOWER PART OF LEVEL 11 dates back, as we’ve seen, to around 50,000 years ago, but the bracelet was found in the upper part, officially designated Level 11.1 and provisionally dated to the Upper Paleolithic about 30,000 years ago 40—making it, because of its “Neolithic” characteristics, roughly 20,000 years ahead of its time.41 

The reader will understand, therefore, why it was one of the frustrations of our trip to Siberia in September 2017 that I was not able to see, nor Santha to photograph, this enigmatic, intriguing, and profoundly out-of-place bracelet. Under normal circumstances it is kept at the Museum of the Peoples of Siberia in Novosibirsk, but as luck would have it, during our short visit there, it was out of town—indeed not only out of town but out of Siberia, out of Russia, and in fact in Paris, where it had been on show in an exhibition. When I said we’d travel there to see it, Irina Salnikova told us that it was no longer on public view and was under investigation by “an international team of archaeologists.”42 

Gone with it was a second anomalous object, an exquisite bone needle 7.6 centimeters in length, with a near-microscopic eye less than 1 millimeter in diameter drilled out at the head.43 Slightly curved like a modern surgical suture needle, it was excavated from the lower part of Level 11 (Level 11.2) of the central chamber in the summer season of 2016.44 No detailed analysis had been published before my visit to Novosibirsk in September 2017, but there was some coverage in the Russian media when the discovery was announced. “It is the most unique find of this season, which can even be called sensational,” commented Professor Michael Shunkov, coauthor of the report on the bracelet and director of the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography at the Russian Academy of Sciences.45 His colleague Dr. Maxim Kozlikin added, “It’s the longest needle found in Denisova Cave. We have found needles before, but in younger archaeological layers.”46 

He was referring specifically to the upper part of Level 11 where the bracelet was found and where, indeed, other smaller bone needles had also been excavated some years before.47 They, too, have fine drilled-out eyes of the type more usually seen in Neolithic than in Paleolithic deposits and provided grounds for skeptics to suggest that the Denisovan dates might have to be revised.48 The idea was floated that both the bracelet and the small needles must in fact be of Neolithic provenance but had somehow migrated downward through the deposits to end up in Level 11.1—a stratum, from the skeptical point of view, in which they were “obviously” too advanced and “untypical” to belong. 

What put an end to such speculation was the discovery of the longer, even finer and more technically perfect needle in 2016 and its location not in the upper—younger—part of Level 11 near its contact with Level 10, but instead in the much older lower part near its contact with Level 12. As we’ve seen, this lower part of Level 11 has been dated by accelerated mass spectrometry 116 to around 50,000 years before the present 49 (although it may be more ancient, given that 50,000 years is the limit of radiocarbon dating). 

By the second half of 2016, therefore, far from proving younger as some had expected, the mysterious artifacts of Denisova Cave were beginning to look like they were much, much older. This impression was confirmed in 2017 with a shocking announcement. Level 11 had been reassessed and its various internal strata reexamined and re-dated. The result of these new investigations was that the bracelet was no longer thought to be 30,000 years old as had originally been supposed, but 50,000 years old!50

A year later the Siberian Times published speculation that it might be even older—perhaps as much as “65,000 to 70,000 years old.”51 

Professor Shunkov did not welcome the speculation and pointed out that the great antiquity of the bracelet was already a matter of global significance, with immense implications for the way archaeologists look at the past.52 He wasn’t about to commit to an older date before all the relevant experts had reached consensus. “Until then, I will refrain from saying anything,” he explained, adding that some data was “ambiguous” and required clarification. “If or when we agree, we will have to prepare a publication first.”53 

I could understand his caution. It was the same sort of caution, for pretty much the same reasons, as Tom Deméré had felt for so long before presenting his controversial evidence and conclusions about the Cerutti Mastodon Site in the pages of Nature. With discoveries like these that have 117 the potential to disrupt years of comfortable scientific consensus it pays to take care, and to prepare the ground, before you go public. 

Persistent rumors filter out of paradigm-busting new discoveries concerning the Denisovans and “multiple big headlines coming up.”54 Meanwhile that beautiful and haunting cave in the Siberian Altai was still, as I write these words in 2018, the only place on earth where physical remains of Denisovans have been confirmed.55 Those so far recovered are few in number, but such are the wonders of genetic science that the fingertip we spoke of earlier, some teeth, some additional bone fragments, and even some dust from the cave floor allow us to be quite sure that Denisovans were in occupation here at least as early as 170,000 years ago and that they came back 110,000 years ago and again around 50,000 years ago.56 

Just like the Neanderthals who overlapped with our ancestors and interbred with them, so, too, the Denisovans overlapped the Neanderthals and interbred with them while also, again like the Neanderthals, interbreeding with anatomically modern humans. Viable offspring capable of reproduction resulted from all these liaisons and in August 2018, Denisova Cave obliged yet again by yielding up a bone fragment, more than 50,000 years old and in sufficiently good condition for genome sequencing. It turned out to have belonged to a female, about 13 years of age, who had a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father.57 

In consequence of such liaisons it’s a tricky business, tens of thousands of years later, to unravel the tangle of inheritance—with gene flow going in both directions between Neanderthals and Denisovans, Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans, and Denisovans and anatomically modern humans. Thus, where Denisovan DNA is found in human populations today (to give just a single example of the sorts of difficulties faced), researchers must be alert to the possibility that it may not have come directly from a Denisovan but via a Neanderthal who had inherited DNA from an earlier tryst, perhaps dozens of generations back, between a Neanderthal and a Denisovan. Multiple other bewildering combinations are also possible, but using powerful computers geneticists are able to disentangle this cat’s-cradle of intertwining genes and lives. 

What now appears to be certain is that Neanderthals, Homo sapiens (as modern humans are classified taxonomically), and Denisovans all shared and descended from a common ancestor a million years or so ago.58 The divergence of the Neanderthal line from the modern human line began at least 430,000 years ago, and perhaps as early as 765,000 years ago.59 The divergence of the Neanderthal line from the Denisovan line occurred between 381,000 and 473,000 years ago.60 Humans today are therefore, to a greater or lesser degree, hybrids who have inherited genes from Neanderthals, Denisovans, and archaic Homo sapiens. 

CROSSING THE LINE 

THE MODERN INHABITANTS OF THE Altai are notable in that they have inherited virtually no Denisovan DNA at all—just a tiny fraction of a single percent.61 By contrast, the human populations with the highest percentage of Denisovan DNA today are found among “geographically isolated New Guinean and Australian aborigines (in the range of 3–4%).”62 The first detailed investigation went a little higher than this in some cases, concluding, for example, that the archaic Denisovan population “contributed 4–6% of its genetic material to the genomes of present-day Melanesians.”63 Subsequently, varying levels of Denisovan admixture have also been identified in populations from eastern Indonesia, the Philippines, Near and Remote Oceania, and the Americas.64 

At first this widespread heritage seems strange in view of the location of Denisova Cave itself, deep in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia, thousands of miles from New Guinea and Australia and even farther from the Americas. But tens of millennia have passed since the Denisovans occupied the cave, occasionally interbreeding with Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans and passing on their genes through all kinds of convoluted liaisons and migrations. We don’t even know—on the most recent evidence it seems unlikely—that the cave was in any way central to the Denisovan range. It could equally well have been some peripheral outpost and indeed a number of scientists, notable among them Alan Cooper of the University of Adelaide and Christopher Stringer of London’s Natural History Museum, have made a case that the ancient Denisovan homeland was not in Siberia, or indeed in Asia at all, but instead lay “east of Wallace’s Line.”65 

A deep oceanic trough, notorious for its fast-flowing currents, Wallace’s Line divides Asia to its west from Australia to its east. It is rightly recognized as “one of the world’s biggest biogeographic disjunctions”66 and even during the lowered sea levels of the last Ice Age it would always have confronted migrants seeking to travel in either direction with a challenging maritime crossing. Any who undertook it must not only have been intrepid explorers of unknown realms and lands, but must also have possessed sufficient sailing and navigational skills to cross 30 kilometers of deep and sometimes turbulent open water between Bali and Lombok and, in the case of those who reached Papua New Guinea and Australia, to cross again the wider gulf of the Timor Straits—a formidable barrier of 90 kilometers of open water even at times of lowest sea level. 

Coupled with the presence very far to the west in Siberia of Denisovan artifacts as well as Denisovan physical remains yielding a fully sequenced genome, the prominent Denisovan genetic signal among Australian aborigines and Melanesians cannot be explained without invoking these open-water crossings. In remote antiquity somebody was certainly undertaking them, and in the process spreading Denisovan genes. What we don’t know yet is whether this gene flow was the result of direct interbreeding with the Denisovans themselves, or with some perhaps as yet unidentified people whose own heritage included a significant admixture of Denisovan genes. 

We also don’t know, and can only guess, at the location of the lost homeland of the Denisovans. Was it east of Wallace’s Line, as Cooper and Stringer have argued? Or might it not just as well have been west of the Line on the plains and savannas of the exposed Sunda Shelf during the lowered sea levels of the last Ice Age when the Malaysian peninsula and the islands of Sumatra, Java, and Borneo all formed one continuous landmass?67 

Wherever it was, we know that 90 kilometers of open water was no barrier to these people—so why not farther? Why should they not even have crossed to the other side of the Pacific Ocean, making landfall in the Americas?

9 

THE STRANGE AND MYSTERIOUS GENETIC HERITAGE OF NATIVE AMERICANS 

BY NO MEANS FULLY UNDERSTOOD yet despite the best efforts of Darwin and his successors, the process we call “evolution” combines continuous change with continuous conservation in an endless, swirling, bewildering dance of almost unbelievable intricacy. Zoom in at sufficiently high resolution to the DNA that choreographs this dance, however, and certain distinct and identifiable patterns begin to emerge. Because we are all members of a single human family, these patterns can then be used to establish the degree of relatedness—and thus to track the prehistoric migrations and liaisons—of seemingly disparate populations, even if they now reside on opposite sides of the globe. It’s an endeavor of great technical complexity, deploying the latest advances in twenty-first-century genomic science, but it reveals previously hidden clues to the lost story of our past and—potentially—offers us a way out of the cultural amnesia that has erased tens of thousands of years of ancestral experiences from our collective memory. 

This is not a genetics textbook and I don’t want us to get bogged down in superfluous details, but here are some essentials we’ll need going forward: 

1. DNA is the genetic mechanism of inheritance, and the various types of DNA present in our cells have, as a result of scientific advances in  the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, been subject to close investigation by a range of highly sophisticated techniques.1 The results of these investigations have shed light on the degree of genetic relatedness that exists between individuals and, on a larger scale, between entire populations.2 

2. Located in the fluid surrounding the nucleus of every cell in our bodies, mtDNA (mitochondrial DNA) is inherited by both males and females but is passed on to offspring only by females.3 MtDNA can identify lines of descent from shared maternal, but not paternal, ancestors.4 What geneticists like about mtDNA is its abundance, being present in multiple copies per cell, giving plenty of material to work with.5 

3. The same cannot be said of nuclear DNA, inherited equally from both parents, which has only two copies per cell but which encodes far more genetic information than mtDNA, allowing for far more robust and precise analyses of genetic relatedness.6 

4. Within the cell nucleus are also located the chromosomes—segments of DNA that determine sex. If you have two X chromosomes you’re a female; if you have an X and a Y you’re male. Y-DNA is passed on only by males, thus facilitating the determination only of shared paternal ancestry, whereas X-DNA is inherited both through the maternal and paternal lines (since males and females both have X chromosomes) and can therefore be useful in isolating shared common ancestors along particular branches of inheritance.7 

Is it important to understand the technicalities of DNA and DNA analysis as a means of establishing degrees of relatedness? 

By all means dig deeper if you wish to, for this whole area of science is a fascinating one. But don’t feel you have to—any more, for example, than you might feel you must master plumbing in order to run water from a tap, or the intricacies of mechanical engineering in order to drive a car, or medical studies before undergoing surgery. 

In other words, genetics, unlike archaeology, is a hard science where the pronouncements of experts are based on facts, measurements, and replicable experimentation rather than inferences or preconceived opinions. Mistakes are made by geneticists, of course, and profound disagreements are routinely thrashed out between colleagues in the professional journals. By and large, however, just as we trust the engineer, or the plumber, or the surgeon for their specialized knowledge (even though they sometimes get things wrong), it will streamline matters greatly here if we trust the conclusions of specialists working with the latest high-tech tools at the cutting edge of analysis of ancient DNA. 

TWO SITES, 

TWO FAMILIES, 

ONE HUMAN RACE 

MIND YOU, “SHOTGUN SEQUENCING” OF long strands of DNA and other similarly esoteric technologies are not required for us to connect—at a basic human level—with the story of our ancestors. Particularly poignant examples of what I mean here are provided at two ancient sites, one in Siberia and one in Montana. 

The Siberian site lies to the west of Lake Baikal near the village of Mal’ta on the banks of the Bolshaya Belaya River. As the crow flies (and a great deal farther on foot through winding valleys and over high passes) this is a location more than 1,000 kilometers east of Denisova Cave. Its reach back into the human past does not extend as far as Denisova’s. Still it has been recognized for many years as the home of an Upper Paleolithic culture— archaeologists call it the Mal’ta-Buret culture—that left behind many beautiful and mysterious works of art thought to be more than 20,000 years old.8 Among them, done in bone and mammoth ivory, are carvings of elegant, long-necked water fowl and a collection of thirty human Venus figures that are “rare for Siberia but found at a number of Upper Paleolithic sites across western Eurasia.”9 

The primary excavations at Mal’ta, which took place between 1928 and 1958,10 also uncovered two burials, both of young children interred with curious and beautiful grave goods including pendants, badges, and ornamental beads.11 One of these children, a boy aged 3–4 years and now known to archaeologists as MA-I, had been buried beneath a stone slab, there was a Venus figurine beside him,12 and he was “wearing an ivory diadem, a bead necklace and a bird-shaped pendant.”13 Traces of pigmentation were found on his bones,14 which presently reside in the Hermitage State Museum in St. Petersburg, where a high-level international team of investigators, prominently featuring geneticists and evolutionary biologists, paid them a visit in 2009. The scientists drilled out a number of small samples from the bones and subjected them to accelerator mass spectrometry C-14 dating that showed them, give or take a few hundred years, to be 24,000 years old.15 Detailed tests were then carried out on the samples and in due course the investigators announced that they had successfully sequenced MA-1’s entire genome—making it, when a full account of the investigation was published in Nature in 2014, “the oldest anatomically modern human genome reported to date.”16 

We’ll consider the implications of what was found in context also of the second site I mentioned above—located in Montana. Known to archaeologists as the Anzick-1 burial site and dated to 12,600 years ago (which makes it 11,400 years younger than MA-1), it is also a child’s grave —in this case a boy aged 1–2 years who was interred with more than 100 tools of stone and antler, all sprinkled with red ochre.17 

One thing we see for sure in both these ancient burials, separated by thousands of miles and thousands of years, is that the human capacity to love and cherish family members, and to regret and mourn those who pass prematurely, is not diminished by time; indeed, we instantly recognize and identify with it today because we share it. For convenience we’ll continue to use the rather dehumanizing archaeological labels “MA-1” and “Anzick-1” here. But let’s not forget the bereaved parents and family members as they gathered around those gravesides 24,000 years ago in Siberia and 12,600 years ago in Montana, and the care and thought, the symbolism and emotions, the love and the aching sense of loss that went into the careful preparation of the graves and the choice and placing of the grave goods in both cases. 

Across the ages and regardless of geography, in everything that really matters, it bears repeating that we are all members of a SINGLE human family—a family of intrepid adventurers who have been exploring the world in one form or another for the best part of a million years.18 In the course of this long odyssey we’ve moved so far apart, across oceans, over mountains, and to the opposite ends of jungles, deserts, and ice caps that we’ve forgotten how closely related we in fact are. In this sense, like the simple human message of the burials, the message of genetics also speaks to a hidden unity within our apparent diversity—and sometimes in ways that defy our expectations. 

ANCIENT EUROPEAN GENES 

FEW HAVE COMMENTED ON THE obvious cultural similarities in burial practices, but as to genetics, all authorities agree that MA-1 and Anzick-1 are closely related, sharing large sequences of DNA.19 Anzick-1, however, “belonged to a population directly ancestral to many contemporary Native Americans” and thus, unsurprisingly—despite his proximity to MA-1—is “more closely related to all indigenous American populations than to any other group.”20 

Just as it was for so long an article of faith that the Americas were peopled exclusively by migrations from Siberia across the Bering land bridge, so, too, it was held to be self-evident that those Siberian migrants must have been most closely related to east Asians.21 What did the Bering land bridge do, after all, if not connect the far northeast of Asia with the far northwest of North America? 

But a surprise awaited the investigative team led by Maanasa Raghavan of the Centre for GeoGenetics at Denmark’s Natural History Museum and Pontus Skoglund of Harvard Medical School’s Department of Genetics. Instead of confirming the anticipated connection to east Asia, MA-1’s Y chromosome (the male sex chromosome) turned out to be “basal to modern day western Eurasians.”22 We have mentioned the limitations of Y chromosome analysis already, so it is good—and raises the confidence level all around—that this unanticipated and potentially boat-rocking finding was subsequently confirmed with autosomal evidence 23 (the best kind of DNA evidence, derived from the nucleus of the cell). “MA-1,” the investigators repeat and reemphasize, “is basal to modern-day western Eurasians … with no close affinity to east Asians.”24 

Moreover—and most intriguingly—the investigators discovered that MA-1 also stands “near the root of most Native American lineages,”25 and “14 to 125 38% of Native American ancestry may originate through gene flow from this ancient population [the population from which MA-1 stemmed]. This is likely to have occurred after the divergence of Native American ancestors from east Asian ancestors, but before the diversification of Native American populations in the New World.”26 

The final link in the chain of evidence emerged when MA-1’s mitochondrial genome was sequenced, revealing the Siberian infant to be a member of “haplogroup U, which has also been found at high frequency among Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic European hunter-gatherers.”27 

“Our result,” the investigators conclude, “therefore suggests a connection between pre-agricultural Europe and Upper Paleolithic Siberia.”28 

A genetic consequence of this previously unsuspected European/Siberian nexus, since as much as 38 percent of Native American ancestry is attributable to gene flow from MA-1’s people, is that Native American DNA carries a strong and very ancient “European” signal.29[I find that very interesting  DC]

HIDDEN SOUTH AMERICAN 

ORIGINS OF CLOVIS REVEALED 

SOMETHING I HAVEN’T MENTIONED YET—the ochre-dusted stone and antler tools found buried with Anzick-1 were unmistakably Clovis artifacts.30 

There are two reasons why this “Clovis connection” is particularly noteworthy and relevant to our quest. 

First, the Anzick-1 burial was originally dated to around 12,600 years ago —or, more exactly, within the limits of resolution of C-14, to between 12,707 and 12,556 years ago.31 This suggested that the grave was dug and the grave goods placed with the remains of the deceased infant a century or two after the abrupt and mysterious disappearance of the Clovis culture from the archaeological record around 12,800 years ago. 

That disappearance testifies to a sudden cessation of previously widespread cultural activities, suggestive of interruption by some far-reaching cataclysmic event. What it does not mean, however, is that every member of the Clovis population died out overnight. Even if most did there would, undoubtedly, have been survivors—small groups coalescing into scattered, wandering tribes, whose members might have looked back on the achievements of their ancestors with awe. 

One possibility that has been considered is that Anzick-1 himself may have belonged to just such a remnant group. This possibility was raised after a small but significant discrepancy was found between the dates of Anzick-1’s bones and the dates of certain artifacts buried with him. 

The artifacts, known as “foreshafts,” are specially cut, shaped, and hollowed sections of red deer antler, each designed to hold a projectile point at one end and to clamp onto the tip of a wooden spear shaft at the other. As we’ve seen, Anzick-1’s bones were initially dated between 12,707 and 12,556 years ago. The antler foreshafts among his grave goods are a century or two older than that—in the range of 12,800 to 13,000 years ago 32—“a much more typical and acceptable age for Clovis,” as archaeologist Stuart J. Fiedel observes, than the “age attributed to the infant’s bones.”33 

To resolve the discrepancy, Fiedel offers a simple but insightful reading of the evidence. The discordant data, he speculates in a paper published in Quaternary International in June 2017, would be reconciled if “the foreshafts were 100 to 200-year-old antique heirlooms interred with the infant by the very last Clovis folks in the region.”34 

Alternatively he suggests that due to contamination of the sample, “the infant bone dates may be slightly too young.”35 

A number of other researchers seized on the apparent temporal discrepancy to discount Anzick-1 as a Clovis individual,36 but Fiedel’s comment on contamination proved prescient. In June 2018, a year after his Quaternary International paper, a new study by scientists at the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) under the headline “Reassessing the Chronology of the Archaeological Site of Anzick.”37 The study reminds us that “in radiocarbon dating, contamination can be a major source of error” but adds that “methodological improvements” since the original dating work at Anzick was done “have seen a significant effect in dating accuracy and reliability.”38 After applying these new methods the study concludes, contrary to previous findings, that “Anzick-1 is temporally coeval with the dated antler rods. This implies that the individual is indeed temporally associated with the Clovis assemblage.”39 

We’ll return to the mysterious end of the Clovis culture in later chapters. Meanwhile there’s a second reason why Anzick-1’s “Clovis connection” is of immediate relevance to our quest here—which is that although Clovis did, at the limits of its range, extend into some northern areas of South America, its heartland was in North America.40 Intuitively, therefore, we would expect the Montana infant, a Clovis individual, to be much more closely related to Native North Americans than to Native South Americans. Further investigations, however, while reconfirming that Anzick-1’s genome had a greater affinity to all Native Americans than to any extant Eurasian population,41 revealed it to be much more closely related to native South Americans than to Native North Americans! 42 

Morten Rasmussen of Denmark’s Centre for GeoGenetics and Pontus Skoglund of the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School seek to explain the anomaly by arguing that the ancestors of the First Americans must have split into two separate groups—they label them “the NA and SA lineages”—before entering the Americas, “with the Anzick-1 individual belonging to the SA lineage.”43 

That seems reasonable enough on the face of things until we stop to consider the spectacle of these two groups, sharing common ancestry but already genetically distinct, racing into the Americas on parallel and non-converging tracks, one heading straight for South America, the other staying in North America—yet never, throughout this process, making sufficiently enduring contact with one another to compromise their separateness or leave a trace in the genetic record. This seems to deny human nature and simply doesn’t make sense in lots of ways even before we get to the fact that Anzick-1, the most ancient representative of the “SA lineage” so far studied by science,44 wasn’t found anywhere near South America but in North America and, indeed, in Montana, which, 12,600 years ago, was about as far north as you could get before you hit the great Cordilleran ice sheet. 

A PECULIAR SIGNAL FROM DOWN UNDER

IN SUMMARY, ANZICK-1 IS A paradox clothed in a conundrum, wrapped up in a mystery—an individual in a North American Clovis culture grave who is closely related to Native South Americans, to the Siberian Mal’ta population, and to ancient western Europeans. Because the South American lineage to which he belonged shared a common ancestor with the North American lineage, the geneticists found nothing in the data to challenge their long-held view that the settlement of the Americas, both North and South, had been accomplished from northeast Asia by a single founding population—albeit one that divided itself into two streams. 

A year later, however, in September 2015, Pontus Skoglund, his senior colleague Professor David Reich of the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, and other leading experts in the field announced in the pages of Nature that they had found new evidence in South America, and specifically in the Amazon rainforest, that called for a rethink: 

Here we analyse genome-wide data to show that some Amazonian Native Americans descend partly from a Native American founding population that carried ancestry more closely related to indigenous Australians, New Guineans and Andaman Islanders than to any present-day Eurasians or Native Americans. This signature is not present to the same extent, or at all, in present-day Northern and Central Americans or in a 12,600-year-old Clovis associated genome, suggesting a more diverse set of founding populations of the Americas than previously accepted. 45 

We’ve already done the groundwork on the “12,600-year-old Clovis associated genome” the researchers speak of here. The reference, of course, is to Anzick-1, that paradoxical infant, swaddled in mystery, who we know was more closely related to Native South Americans than to Native North Americans. What the new study adds to this is that there was a previously unsuspected structure within the SA lineage, including at least one sublineage—to which Anzick-1 did not belong—that was more closely related to Melanesian Papuans and Australian Aborigines than to any extant Native American population. 

There is no trace of this lineage in most modern Native Americans, and— it’s worth driving this point home—no trace either in the ancestral population represented by Anzick-1. Nevertheless, the investigators continued to be confronted by a peculiar and distinctive “Australasian signal,” showing genetic relatedness to “indigenous groups in Australia, Melanesia, and island Southeast Asia,”46 calling attention to itself in the genomes of Native Americans from the heart of the Amazon jungle. The Surui and Karitiana tribes, speaking languages belonging to the Tupi family, proved to have a peculiarly close connection to Australasians, as did the Ge-speaking Xavante of the central Brazilian plateau.47 

Such a signal was completely unexpected given the vast distance between Australasia and the Amazon and the absence of any overland DNA trail. Skoglund and Reich therefore subjected it to particularly rigorous testing, applying four different methods of statistical analysis to compare the genomes of 30 Central and South American peoples with the genomes of 197 other populations from around the world.48 “We spent a really long time trying to make this result go away,” Skoglund explained, “but it just got stronger.”49 

In the end “a statistically clear signal linking Native Americans in the Amazonian region of Brazil to present-day Australo-Melanesians and Andaman Islanders” was confirmed.50 

“It’s incredibly surprising,” commented David Reich. “There’s a strong working model in archaeology and genetics, of which I have been a proponent, that most Native Americans today extend from a single pulse of expansion south of the ice sheets—and that’s wrong. We missed something very important in the original data.”51 

What was missed, Reich and Skoglund argue, was nothing less than the fingerprints of a lost lineage—a second founding population of the Americas. It is very old,52 in their view, and almost all traces of it have been overwritten almost everywhere by later genetic “noise.” That we can still detect it at all among isolated peoples in the Amazon is probably because their genomes have been subject to less admixture and introgression than most. 

The investigators have given their “putative ancient Native American lineage” a name: “Population Y” after Ypykuéra, which means “ancestor” in the Tupi language family.”53 

And they come to a very clear, if tantalizing, conclusion: “A Population Y that had ancestry from a lineage more closely related to present-day Australasians than to present-day East Asians and Siberians likely contributed to the DNA of Native Americans from Amazonia and the Central Brazilian Plateau.”54 

But how, when, and where did this contribution occur? One possibility that Skoglund and Reich consider is that the patterns of genomic variation of present-day Amazonians could be explained if a large proportion—up to 85 percent—of their ancestry derived “from a population that existed in a substructured northeast Asia, and was similar to the main lineage that gave rise to other Native Americans while retaining more Australasian affinity.”55 

In other words, congregating in that original northeast Asian—that is, Siberian—melting pot we are now being asked to envisage not only people with European genes and people with east Asian genes, but also people with Australasian genes. Neanderthals were part of the mix, too, interbreeding vigorously with Homo sapiens, and there were people carrying Denisovan genes and of course the Denisovans themselves. We’re asked to see these groups as essentially divided and separate from one another—despite the obvious evidence of their liaisons—and we’re asked to accept that they remained divided and separate, already conveniently prearranging themselves into what would become the “NA” and “SA” lineages, as they trekked across the Bering land bridge. 

The endlessly flexible boundaries of such an improbable model seem perfectly adapted to explain away any potentially boat-rocking data. It’s not surprising, therefore, to find a hermetically sealed and hitherto invisible “Australasian lineage” being tacked on to the mongrel pedigree of the First Americans as soon as the inconvenient presence of Australasian genes in the midst of the Amazon jungle needed to be explained and normalized. Nor is it surprising to see the hypothetical “Population Y,” identified as the bearer of those genes, depicted as heading straight to South America to oblige without leaving any of its DNA along the way among the North American populations with which it would surely have had to mingle. 

Perhaps because of the impracticality of some of these ideas, Skoglund and Reich conclude with an offbeat alternative. “The patterns of genomic variation of present-day Amazonians,” they point out, seemingly off the cuff, could also be explained “by as little as 2% admixture from an Australasianrelated population, that would thus have penetrated deep inside the Americas without mixing with the main ancestral lineage of present-day Native Americans.”56 

In other words, on this view, what has been preserved in those isolated, unadulterated Amazonian genomes that speaks to an ancient connection with Australasia might not be the traces of a full-scale migration but something more like a one-off settlement by a relatively small group. 

In the next chapter we’ll consider the profound implications of this scenario for our understanding of American prehistory.

next

A SIGNAL FROM THE DREAMTIME?

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