COOL: A skeleton clue to early American ancestry.

Chatters and colleagues report the discovery of a near-complete Late Pleistocene-age human skeleton. It was hidden deep in a submerged chamber in the Sac Actun cave system on Mexico’s Eastern Yucatán Peninsula. . . .

Despite differences in craniofacial form, this early American woman was related to modern Native Americans; the differences in craniofacial form are probably best explained as evolutionary changes that happened after the divergence of Beringians from their Siberian ancestors, the authors say.

Their work suggests that America was not colonized by separate migration events from different parts of Eurasia. Rather, the earliest Americans represent an early population expansion out of Beringia. This aligns with the hypothesis that both Paleoamericans and Native Americans derive from a single source population.