First Native Americans came from Siberia
What would Jefferson think?
The third President had a “thing” about Native Americans. Like Rousseau he believed in the noble savage. Some feel that our constitution was even derived from Cherokee/Iroquois traditions of governance by the people.
Of course in Jefferson’s time, Darwin was still in the future and no real ideas existed about humans other than that we “were all created …” I would assume that in Jefferson’s mind the world was still Eurocentric … if not god given, at least history bestowed on white men the role of givers of civilization.
Jefferson might be astonished to learn what DNA can tell us. Now, DNA analysis of a 24,000 years old skeleton of a young Siberian boy showed that nearly 30 percent of modern Native American’s ancestry came directly from Siberia. The skeleton was discovered in the late 1920s near the Siberian village of Mal’ta.