It is always interesting to hear US residents of recent European heritage calling themselves Americans and railing against immigrants. If anybody has the right to do both of these things, it's the descendants of the first arrivals, who came in from the Bering strait and spread out across to the entire length of the two continents less than 20,000 years ago.
Details of this enormous migration movement were very sketchy until recently, but ancient DNA sequencing work has now added some interesting detail to the picture, identifying unsuspected population movements and connecting genome characteristics to archaeological finds. Intriguingly, the family tree of the Native American languages has remained elusive so far.
My feature about all of this, published in the last issue of 2018, is now in the open archives:
Ancient genomes of the Americas
Ancient American populations settled in the Andean highlands more than 8,000 years ago, including the surroundings of Lake Titicaca, shown here. (Image: Bobistraveling/Flickr.)
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