Beringia is defined today as the land and maritime area bounded on the west by the Lena River in Russia; on the east by the Mackenzie River in Canada; on the north by 72 degrees north latitude in the Chukchi Sea; and on the south by the tip of the Kamchatka Peninsula. It includes the Chukchi Sea, the Bering Sea, the Bering Strait, the Chukchi and Kamchatka Peninsulas in Russia as well as Alaska in the United States and the Yukon in Canada.
The Paleo-Eskimo were the peoples who inhabited the Arctic region from Chukotka in present-day Russia across North America to Greenland prior to the arrival of the modern Inuit (Eskimo) and related cultures. The first known Paleo-Eskimo cultures developed by 2500 BCE, but were gradually displaced in most of the region, with the last one, the Dorset culture, disappearing around 1500 CE.
Paleo-Indians were the first peoples who entered and subsequently inhabited the Americas during the final glacial episodes of the late Pleistocene period. The prefix paleo- comes from the Ancient Greek adjective: παλαιός, romanized: palaiós, lit. 'old; ancient'. The term Paleo-Indians applies specifically to the lithic period in the Western Hemisphere and is distinct from the term Paleolithic.
The Paleo-Arctic Tradition is the name given by archaeologists to the cultural tradition of the earliest well-documented human occupants of the North American Arctic, which date from the period 8000–5000 BC. The tradition covers Alaska and expands far into the east, west, and the Southwest Yukon Territory.
The relationship between genetics and the Book of Mormon is based on implicit claims in the Book of Mormon about the ancestry of indigenous American peoples, which can be evaluated through genetic research. Specifically, the Book of Mormon claims that the ancestors of some or all Native Americans were Israelites.
Fuegians are the indigenous inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, at the southern tip of South America. The name has been credited to Captain James Weddell, who supposedly created the term in 1822.
The Solutrean hypothesis on the peopling of the Americas claims that the earliest human migration to the Americas took place from Europe, with Solutreans traveling along pack ice in the Atlantic Ocean. This hypothesis contrasts with the mainstream academic narrative that the Americas were first populated by people crossing the Bering Strait to Alaska by foot on what was land during the Last Glacial Period or by following the Pacific coastline from Asia to America by boat.
The Trail Creek Caves are a group of twelve caves found within the Bering Land Bridge National Preserve on the Seward Peninsula of the U.S. state of Alaska. This is a significant archeological site due to the discovery of several artifacts of ancient hunters. These included stone tools and bone fragments dated to 8,500 years or earlier. The caves were discovered in 1928 by Taylor Moto and Alfred Karmun, locals from Deering, Alaska. Geologist David Hopkins tested the site in 1948. This location was first excavated in from 1949-1950 by Danish archeologist Helge Larsen. The caves are located along Trail Creek 65°47′28″N163°24′58″W near its mouth at Cottonwood Creek in the Northwest Arctic Borough.
The genetic history of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas is divided into two distinct periods: the initial peopling of the Americas during about 20,000 to 14,000 years ago, and European contact, after about 500 years ago. The first period of the genetic history of Indigenous Americans is the determinant factor for the number of genetic lineages, zygosity mutations, and founding haplotypes present in today's Indigenous American populations.
Haplogroup Q-L54 is a subclade of Y-DNA haplogroup Q-L53. Q1a3a-L54 is defined by the presence of the L54 Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP).
The Beringian wolf is an extinct population of wolf that lived during the Ice Age. It inhabited what is now modern-day Alaska, Yukon, and northern British Columbia. Some of these wolves survived well into the Holocene. The Beringian wolf is an ecomorph of the gray wolf and has been comprehensively studied using a range of scientific techniques, yielding new information on their prey species and feeding behaviors. It has been determined that these wolves are morphologically distinct from modern North American wolves and genetically basal to most modern and extinct wolves. The Beringian wolf has not been assigned a subspecies classification and its relationship with the extinct European cave wolf is not clear.
The Pleistocene wolf, also referred to as the Late Pleistocene wolf, is an extinct lineage or ecomorph of the grey wolf. It was a Late Pleistocene 129 Ka – early Holocene 11 Ka hypercarnivore. While comparable in size to a large modern grey wolf, it possessed a shorter, broader palate with large carnassial teeth relative to its overall skull size, allowing it to prey and scavenge on Pleistocene megafauna. Such an adaptation is an example of phenotypic plasticity. It was once distributed across the northern Holarctic. Phylogenetic evidence indicates that despite being much smaller than this prehistoric wolf, the Japanese wolf, which went extinct in the early 20th century, was of a Pleistocene wolf lineage, thus extending its survival to several millennia after its previous estimated extinction around 7,500 years ago.
The Upward Sun River site, or Xaasaa Na’, is a Late Pleistocene archaeological site associated with the Paleo-Arctic tradition, located in the Tanana River Valley, Alaska. Dated to around 11,500 BP, Upward Sun River is the site of the oldest human remains discovered on the American side of Beringia. The site was first discovered in 2006.
In archaeogenetics, the term Ancient North Eurasian (ANE) is the name given to an ancestral component that represents the lineage of the people of the Mal'ta–Buret' culture (c. 24,000 BP) and populations closely related to them, such as the Upper Paleolithic individuals from Afontova Gora in Siberia. Genetic studies also revealed that the ANE are closely related to the remains of the preceding Yana Culture (c. 32,000 BP), which were dubbed as 'Ancient North Siberians' (ANS), and which either are directly ancestral to the ANE, or both being closely related sister lineages, sharing a common origin from the merger of an 'Early West Eurasian' hunter-gatherer lineage (represented by Kostenki-14, c. 38,000 BP) and an 'Early East Eurasian' population (represented by the Tianyuan man, c. 40,000 BP). The Ancient North Eurasians derive around 2/3 from an Early West Eurasian lineage and around 1/3 of their ancestry from an Early East Eurasian lineage.
The peopling of the Americas began when Paleolithic hunter-gatherers (Paleo-Indians) entered North America from the North Asian Mammoth steppe via the Beringia land bridge, which had formed between northeastern Siberia and western Alaska due to the lowering of sea level during the Last Glacial Maximum. These populations expanded south of the Laurentide Ice Sheet and spread rapidly southward, occupying both North and South America, by 12,000 to 14,000 years ago. The earliest populations in the Americas, before roughly 10,000 years ago, are known as Paleo-Indians. Indigenous peoples of the Americas have been linked to Siberian populations by linguistic factors, the distribution of blood types, and in genetic composition as reflected by molecular data, such as DNA.
This article summarizes the genetic makeup and population history of East Asian peoples and their connection to genetically related populations, as well as Oceanians and partly, Central Asians and South Asians, which are collectively referred to as "East Eurasians" in population genomics.
In archaeogenetics, the term Ancient Northeast Asian (ANA), also known as Amur ancestry, is the name given to an ancestral component that represents the lineage of the hunter-gatherer people of the 7th-4th millennia before present, in far-eastern Siberia, Mongolia and the Baikal regions. They are inferred to have diverged from Ancient East Asians about 24kya ago, and are represented by several ancient human specimens found in archaeological excavations east of the Altai Mountains. They are a sub-group of the Ancient Northern East Asians (ANEA).
In archaeogenetics, the term Ancient Paleo-Siberian or Paleo-Siberian is the name given to an ancestral component that represents the lineage of the hunter-gatherer people of the 15th-10th millennia before present, in northern and northeastern Siberia. The Ancient Paleo-Siberian population is thought to have arisen from an Ancient East Asian lineage, which diverged from other East Asian populations sometimes between 26kya to 36kya, and subsequently came into contact and merged with the Ancient North Eurasians (ANE) sometimes between 20kya to 25kya. The source for the East Asian component among Ancient Paleo-Siberians is to date best represented by Ancient Northern East Asian populations from the Amur region older than 13,000 years, such as AR19K and AR14K, and before the Devil's Cave Ancient Northeast Asian specimens.
In archaeogenetics, the term Ancient Northern East Asian (ANEA), also known as Northern East Asian (NEA), is used to summarize the related ancestral components that represent the Ancient Northern East Asian peoples, extending from the Baikal region to the Yellow River and the Qinling-Huaihe Line in present-day central China. They are inferred to have diverged from Ancient Southern East Asians (ASEA) around 20,000 to 26,000 BCE.
In archaeogenetics, Ancient Southern East Asian (ASEA), also known as Southern East Asian (sEA), is an ancestral lineage that is represented by individuals from Qihe Cave in Fujian and Liangdao Island in the Taiwan Strait as well as Guangxi. Ancient Southern East Asian ancestry significantly contributed to the genetic makeup of modern populations in East Asia, Mainland Southeast Asia, Insular Southeast Asia, and Oceania, and is commonly associated with the Neolithic expansion of early Austronesian and Austroasiatic speakers that occurred more than 4,000 years ago.
