Study: Ice Age humans may have migrated from China to Americas, Japan

By tracing contemporary and ancient human DNA, a group of Chinese and international scientists have recently discovered evidence of Ice Age human migrations from northern coastal China to the Americas and Japan.

It is widely recognized that the ancestors of Native Americans came primarily from Siberia. But recent genetic, geological and archaeological evidence shows that there were many waves of human migration to the Americas from different parts of Eurasia.

Researchers from the Kunming Institute of Zoology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Kunming, Yunnan province, and from other institutions in China and Italy, collected more than 100,000 contemporary and 15,000 ancient DNA samples from Eurasia. They identified 216 contemporary and 39 ancient samples belonging to an ancestral lineage that exists in mitochondrial DNA and can be used to track kinship through female lineage.