In the mid-to-late 1200s, some 30,000 ancestral pueblo farmers left their homes in southwestern Colorado’s Mesa Verde region and never returned. Where these people went and why they left are two of American archeology’s longest-standing mysteries.
Over the past four decades, researchers have come up with ways to run ever-more-sensitive DNA tests. In the most extreme of these, experts can reconstruct the entire genome using DNA fragments extracted from a single cell.
The San Diego Archaeology Center holds a pair of extraordinary skeletons. Dating back about 9,500 years, they are among the oldest human remains ever found in the Americas. A number of scientists would love to study the bones, using powerful new techniques to extract any surviving DNA.
Two Washington State University researchers are part of a new study finding that present-day Native Americans migrated in a single wave from Siberia at least 23,000 years ago.
First came the science, with researchers explaining how they analyzed Kennewick Man’s DNA and concluded that the 9,000-year-old skeleton from Eastern Washington is undoubtedly Native American.
A new study conducted in part by Washington State University researchers Brian Kemp and Timothy Kohler suggests that dogs may have first successfully migrated to the Americas only about 10,000 years ago, thousands of years after the first human migrants crossed a land bridge from Siberia to North America. The study looked at the genetic […]
The recent announcement that a skeleton found under a parking lot in England two years ago is that of King Richard III has laid one mystery to rest – while giving rise to another. Findings of a study published this month in the journal Nature Communications confirmed the skeleton as that of the English monarch […]
For more than a decade, WSU molecular anthropologist Brian Kemp has teased out the ancient DNA of goose and salmon bones from Alaska, human remains from North and South America and human coprolites—ancient poop—from Oregon and the American Southwest. His aim: use genetics as yet another archaeological record offering clues to the identities of ancient […]