They lived in America about 13,000 years ago where they hunted mammoth, mastodons and giant bison with big spears. The Clovis people were not the first humans in America, but they represent the first humans with a wide expansion on the North American continent – until the culture mysteriously disappeared only a few hundred years after its origin. Who the Clovis people were and which present day humans they are related to has been discussed intensely and the issue has a key role in the discussion about how the Americas were peopled. Today there exists only one human skeleton found in association with Clovis tools and at the same time it is among the oldest human skeletons in the Americas. It is a small boy between 1 and 1.5 years of age – found in a 12,600 old burial site, called the Anzick Site, in Wilsall, Montana, USA. Now an international team headed by Danish researcher Eske Willerslev has mapped his genome thereby reviving the scientific debate about the colonization of the Americas.
Roughly estimated some 80 % of all present-day Native American populations on the two American continents are direct descendants of the Clovis boy's family. The remaining 20 % are more closely related with the Clovis family than any other people on Earth, says Lundbeck Professor Eske Willerslev from the Centre for GeoGenetics at the Natural History Museum of Denmark, University of Copenhagen. This surprising result has now been published in the scientific journal Nature. The discovery is so decisive that Nature has chosen to send the article to the press at a later time than usual as they fear the media embargo may be broken. A comprehensive international telephone press conference has been arranged and will be held in the Crow tribe's reservation in Montana – close to where the boy was found. Behind the results are a group of international researchers led by Professor Eske Willerslev from Centre of Excellence in GeoGenetics, Natural History Museum at University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
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