本帖最后由 choi 于 5-21-2014 18:45 编辑
Robert Lee Hotz, New World's Oldest Skeleton Is a Key Genetic Link; Remains found in Mexico connect earliest settlers with continent's natives. Wall Street Journal, May 16, 2014.
online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303908804579563971867031520
two consecutive paragraphs:
“She doesn't look very much like a contemporary Native American. Her face instead resembles a modern African, indigenous Australian or Pacific Islander, the scientists said. Such differences have fueled theories that these first paleo-Americans and modern Native Americans have no kinship.
“Yet by the evidence of her maternal DNA [in mitochondria] she is the ancestor of many Native Americans alive today, the researchers said. They share a unique genetic signature, called haplogroup D1, today found only in the indigenous people of the Americas, the researchers said.
Note:
(a)
(i) Chatters MC et al, Late Pleistocene Human Skeleton and mtDNA Link Paleoamericans and Modern Native Americans. Science, 344: 750-754 (May 16, 2014).
www.sciencemag.org/content/344/6185/750
(ii) Beneath the abstract in the above link is a perspective for the laypesons.
Michael Balter, News & Analysis: Bones From a Watery 'Black Hole' Confirm First American Origins. Science, 344: 680-681 (2014)
www.sciencemag.org/content/344/6185/680.full
Quote:
“In May 2007, Alberto Nava, a diver based in California, was exploring an underwater cave in Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula with two Mexican colleagues. They swam more than a kilometer down a narrow tunnel, which suddenly opened up into a huge, dark chamber. "The floor disappeared under us and we could not see across to the other side," Nava says. They dubbed the chamber Hoyo Negro, Spanish for ‘black hole.’ About 2 months later, the threesome returned to Hoyo Negro to explore it further with powerful underwater lights, revealing a bell-shaped amphitheater some 60 meters in diameter.
“They [anthropologists] say it serves mostly as confirmation of a recent, major study reporting the complete nuclear genome sequence of the 12,700-year-old Anzick child from Montana.
* Rasmussen M et al, The Genome of a Late Pleistocene Human From a Clovis Burial Site in Western Montana. Nature, 506: 225-229 (Feb 13, 2014)
www.nature.com/nature/journal/v506/n7487/full/nature13025.html
, where “Ansick SL” is the second author.
* There is no need to read the perspective if you (a non-subscriber) have no access to it.
(b) Yucatán Peninsula
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucatán_Peninsula
(section 1 Etymology)
(c) “As a specimen, the [12,000-year-old] skeleton, belonging to a girl 15 or 16 years old, was formally designated HN5/48, but those who handled her bones have nicknamed her Naia, after the water nymphs of Greek mythology.”
Naiad
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naiad
(Naiads were a type of water nymphs; section 1 Name: to flow; section 6 Names: Naia [being one of them])
(d) “They [divers who discovered the now submerged cave] named the cavern Hoyo Negro—’the black hole.’"
Spanish English dictionary:
(i) hoyo (noun masculine): "hole"
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hoyo
(ii) negro (noun or adjective, masculine): "black”
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/negro
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