A major find in a cave near the Amur River in far east Russia has resulted in what could be a major discovery about human history.
Scientists have made a discovery in a cave tucked deep in the wilderness of eastern Russia that could totally change how we understand East Asians. They were able to extra DNA from bones of an ancient East Asian and compare it to modern humans, which resulted in the stunning discovery that the genetics of today’s East Asians are extremely similar to those of the ancient residents, proving that unlike the Europeans, the Asians didn’t move around.
It’s been 40 years since the Soviets actually extracted the 7,700-year-old remains of two women in question from the cave, which sits near Russia’s border with China. But it wasn’t until recently that a team of researchers from Russia, the United Kingdom and South Korea were able to sequence the genetic data, which showed that the women’s DNA was 65 percent similar to the Ulchi people living in the Amur basin today, according to a statement from the University of Cambridge.
Not only that, they’re very similar to Japanese and Koreans of today, even though they live further south, indicating that Europeans may have liked to move about, but Asians certainly didn’t back then. In comparison, modern Europeans are about a 20 to 60 percent match for their ancestors.
“Genetically speaking, the populations across northern East Asia have changed very little for around eight millennia,” said senior author Andrea Manica from the University of Cambridge, who conducted the work with an international team, including colleagues from Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology in Korea, and Trinity College Dublin and University College Dublin in Ireland. Once we accounted for some local intermingling, the Ulchi and the ancient hunter-gatherers appeared to be almost the same population from a genetic point of view, even though there are thousands of years between them.”