A large scale genomics study linked North American Arctic cultures to the Paleo-Eskimos, who inhabited Greenland for 4,000 years but disappeared suddenly about 700 years ago.
The findings could help researchers gain insight into migration patterns through the North American Arctic, ScienceAAAS reported.
"This type of study ... will be the key to solving many questions in history and prehistory," Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, who was not involved with the research, told Science.
Many cultures were traced back to the Paleo-Eskimos, but researchers were unsure how these cultures were related to each other. To make their findings the researchers by sequencing the genome of bone, teeth, and hair samples of 169 ancient humans from different time periods. They also looked at the genome of modern-day Inuits and Native Americans.
The team found the Saqqaq and Dorset cultures belonged to one Paleo-Eskimo people, instead of being diverse cultures as researchers had previously believed. The Paleo-Eskimos were found to be genetically distinct from Native Americans and Inuits, meaning they made it to America later on. This could mean humans arrived in the Americas in four waves rather than three.
The study suggests Paleo-Eskimos were a tough group who were able to survive the Arctic climate changes taking part during their existence. During the coldest times they moved to areas such as southern Canada, where they would have lived alongside Native Americans.
"When we see people meeting each other, they may fight each other, but normally they also have sex with each other, that does not seem to be the case here," evolutionary geneticist Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen, a co-author of the study told Science.
The Paleo-Eskimos also shared the same mitochondrial DNA, suggesting there were few birth mothers present and the community was most likely a small one.
