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A thousand-year-old tooth has provided genetic evidence that the so-called “Taíno”, the first indigenous Americans to feel the full impact of European colonisation after Columbus arrived in the New World, still have living descendants in the Caribbean today.

Direct genetic traces of the earliest Native Americans have been identified for the first time in a new study. ̽��ֱ��genetic evidence suggests that people may have entered the continent in a single migratory wave, perhaps arriving more than 20,000 years ago.

Early humans seem to have recognised the dangers of inbreeding at least 34,000 years ago, and developed surprisingly sophisticated social and mating networks to avoid it, new research has found.

̽��ֱ��first significant investigation into the genomics of Aboriginal Australians has uncovered several major findings about early human populations. These include evidence of a single “Out of Africa” migration event, and of a previously unidentified, “ghost-like” population spread which provided a basis for the modern Aboriginal cultural landscape.

Using ancient DNA, researchers have created a unique picture of how a prehistoric migration route evolved over thousands of years – revealing that it could not have been used by the first people to enter the Americas, as traditionally thought.

New research dates plague back to the early Bronze Age, showing it had been endemic in humans across Eurasia for millennia prior to the first recorded global outbreak, and that ancestral plague mutated into its bubonic, flea-borne form between the 2nd and 1st millennium BC.