Mitochondria and Sunrise Girl-Child: Part II

A child was born in the Tanana River Valley in central Alaska (about 50 miles southeast of present day Fairbanks).  The birth had been difficult.  The mother was too young.  The labor too long.  But the child was a girl and, as any neo-natal nurse will tell you, if you must birth an at-risk infant, make it a girl.  They are born fighters.  Nature knows that it takes more women than men to carry on a species and therefore females are slightly hardier at birth.  That is why, even in modern times, there are more male babies born, but more female babies live to celebrate their first birthday.   Life finds a way.

            But this birth did not take place in modern times.  This girl was born around 11,500 years ago.  There was no medicine beyond folk lore and the hard living on the Alaskan interior took their toll.  She died when only about six weeks old.  This child, and another, younger, infant (also a girl) were buried together.  They were covered in red ochre and surrounded with decorative antler bones.  Clearly, their passing was mourned and they buried with ritual and care.  In the custom of the early Ancient Beringians, both girls would have been buried without a name.  They would have been given no name until there first birthday, at which point it was assumed that they would survive.  Until then, the six-week old girl was a nameless hostage to fate. 

            Her body was discovered in 2013 and she was named Xach‘itee‘aanenh T‘eede Gaay in the vernacular of the current Native American people.  The name means Sunrise Girl-Child.  It is not just a beautiful name, it is appropriate.  This child is providing the link to all of the indigenous people of the Western Hemisphere. 

            DNA was extracted from the petrous bone on the skull of this child.  The unmistakable message in the genetic code shows that there was just one, single wave of migration into the Americas.  These stone age humans moved across the now submerged land bridge across the Bering Strait connecting Asia and Alaska.  This all occurred during the last Ice Age.   In the words of Ben Potter, archaeologist at the University of Alaska “The study provides the first direct genomic evidence that all Native American ancestry can be traced back to the same source population during the last Ice Age.”         Why?  Because of mitochondrial DNA, the same DNA that Sunrise Girl-Child got from her mother’s line.  The same DNA that would be passed on to every member of the Beringian hunter-gatherers, expressed only in the female line, the same DNA that currently occurs in a full third of all Native Americans.

            Half of Sunrise’s DNA was clearly from Siberian ancestors, but the other half was split between that of current northern and southern Native Americans.   The research supports the theory that the ancestors of the first Native Americans became a distinct population in northeast Asia around 35,000 years ago, then bred with northern Eurasians or Siberians around 25,000 years ago before crossing the ice bridge over the Bering Strait in a single wave of emigration.  There was no “trickle down” here.  The people we call Native Americans were a successful wave of invaders that found a land free of human population.  They then went forth and multiplied, finding niches in the arid Southwest, the wooded Northeast, the Great Plains and the swamps of the Gulf Coast. 

            It turns out that there are no truly “native” Americans.  We all came here from somewhere else.  Some early, some late, some of their own free will, some under the hand of another, but we all came to the Americas.  The question then becomes: were on earth would you rather be? 

            A child shall lead them to keep the faith.