Beringia isn’t a popular tourist destination anymore, since it’s sumberged under water and all that. But you should have seen it 20,000 years ago. It was something else. A real popular lay over for people traveling from Asia to America. Specifically, scientists have discovered, Beringia was where the ancestors of almost all Native Americans used to live. A new DNA study, published this week by the journal PLoS One, suggests that 95% of the Native Americans from North, Central and South America can trace part of their ancestry to six women whose descendants immigrated to From Asia to the Americas some 20,000 years ago. In case you couldn’t already figure this out, The researchers created a “family tree” that traces the different mitochondrial DNA lineages found in today’s Native Americans. And, obvi, unlike the DNA found in the nucleus, mitochondrial DNA is passed down by the mother.

This discovery, of course, explains why so many people look so Beringian! And it puts the whole immigration thing into perspective. It’s ironic that some people are trying kick people out of a country their family has been living in for over 20,000 years!

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