Earth Log 0018 Into the New World

But before anyone could enter the empty hemisphere, they had to survive the cold that guarded its door. That is where the story begins.

Somewhat later and farther south, at Mal'ta, near Lake Baikal, the body of a small boy was buried around twenty-four thousand years ago with a necklace, a bird-shaped pendant, and a scatter of ivory ornaments. When his genome was sequenced — for a time the oldest modern-human genome known — it delivered a surprise that reaches to the heart of this entry. The Mal'ta boy belonged to a population now called the Ancient North Eurasians, and a substantial share of his ancestry runs forward into living Native Americans [3]. He is not a Native American, and he is not simply East Asian; he is a representative of a northern Eurasian people who, somewhere and somewhen, mixed with an East-Asian-related population to help produce the ancestors of the First Americans [3]. The peopling of the New World, in other words, was not the spilling-over of a single Asian population but the journey of a fused people — part East Asian, part Ancient North Eurasian — assembled in the cold of Ice Age Siberia before any of them ever saw the Americas. The north was not merely an obstacle on the way. It was the forge.