Genetic¹ testing of Iñupiat people currently living in Alaska's North Slope is helping² Northwestern University scientists fill in the blanks on questions about the migration³ patterns and ancestral pool of the people who populated the North American Arctic over the last 5,000 years. "This is the first evidence that genetically⁴ ties all of the Iñupiat and Inuit populations from Alaska, Canada and Greenland back to the Alaskan North Slope," said Northwestern's M. Geoffrey Hayes, senior author of the new study to be published April 29, 2015, in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology⁵.

 

In this study, all mitochondrial DNA⁶ haplogroups previously⁷ found in the ancient remains⁸ of Neo- and Paleo-Eskimos and living Inuit peoples from across the North American Arctic were found within the people living in North Slope villages.

 

These findings support the archaeological model that the "peopling of the eastern Arctic" began in the North Slope, in an eastward⁹ migration from Alaska to Greenland. It also provides new evidence to support the hypothesis that there were two major migrations¹⁰ to the east from the North Slope at two different times in history.

 

"There has never been a clear biological link found in the DNA of the Paleo-Eskimos, the first people to spread from Alaska into the eastern North American arctic, and the DNA of Neo-Eskimos, a more technologically¹¹ sophisticated group that later spread very quickly from Alaska and the Bering Strait region to Greenland and seemed to replace the Paleo-Eskimo," Hayes said.

 

"Our study suggests that the Alaskan North Slope serves as the homeland for both of those groups, during two different migrations. We found DNA haplogroups of both ancient Paleo-Eskimos and Neo-Eskimos in Iñupiat people living in the North Slope today."

点击收听单词发音