We may never know who the Anzick child was. Why he died, just 3 years old, in the foothills of the American Rockies; why he was buried, 12,600 years ago, beneath a huge cache of sharpened flints; or why his kin left him with a bone tool that had been passed down the generations for 150 years.
One thing, however, is certain: his afterlife is anything but ordinary. This week, geneticists announced that the boy is the earliest ancient American to have his entire genome sequenced. Incredibly, he turns out to be a direct ancestor of most tribes in Central and South America – and probably the US too – as well as a very close cousin of Canadian tribes.
Read the full, original story: Ancestry of first Americans revealed by a boy’s genome
