CUTTING-EDGE

24,000-Year-Old Boy's DNA Linked

To Europeans and Native Americans.

Call him the Boy Wonder! The body of a young boy buried in eastern Siberia roughly 24,000 years ago has unlocked a couple of genetic surprises for anthropologists. The boy’s DNA matches both Western Europeans as well as living Native Americans. The first shows that people from modern-day Europe traveled farther east than previously thought. The second discovery challenges the assumption that the first Native Americans descended from Siberian populations related to East Asians. The boy was 3 to 4 years old when buried, and was wearing an ivory diadem, a bead necklace, and a bird-shaped pendant. His remains had been in a museum in St. Petersburg since being excavated in 1958.