With help from a Washington State University population geneticist, Danish researchers have concluded that North America and the Arctic were settled in at least three pulses of migration from Siberia. First came the ancestors of today’s Native Americans, then Paleo-Eskimos – the first to settle in the Arctic – followed by the ancestors of today’s Inuit.
The research, published in the journal Science, settles nearly a century of debate over Arctic settlement and whether today’s Inuit are related to Paleo-Eskimos, who disappeared 700 years ago. That’s about the time the technologically superior Inuit reached Greenland, but the researchers could not tie the disappearance of the Paleo-Eskimos to the Inuit’s arrival.