Most of us who have sent in our DNA to be tested are expecting results that tell us where we came from before our ancestors immigrated to America – if our families have been here a very long time (since the “beginning”), then perhaps we’ve been on American soil for 7 or 8 generations.
My own family came here on the Mayflower, but, obviously, folks met us when we arrived.
When Montana native Darrell “Dusty” Crawford sent in his DNA at his late brother’s request, he was expecting to find Native American heritage. His family lived on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in Heart Butte, and their oral traditions were that they came to North America during the Ice Age, perhaps over the Bering Land Bridge.
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What the DNA company, CRI Genetics, found, though was something far, far more incredible.
The results, they said, were so unprecedented it was “like finding Bigfoot.”
Crawford’s line could be followed back 55 generations.
The company has never traced anyone’s DNA back that far, making his the oldest American DNA ever found.
The DNA also indicates that the Crawfords’ ancestors came from the Pacific, not over the land bridge, settling in South America before traveling north. Though it’s still just a theory, it is one that has some science behind it.
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There are four major Native American groups that populated North America, each of which trace back to a female ancestor – Ai, Ina, Chie, and Sachi. Crawford and his family hail from the Ina clan, or the mtDNA Haplogroup B2, and CRI genetics isn’t sure how that particular line migrated around the world.
“Its path from the Americas is somewhat of a mystery as there are no frequencies of the haplogroup in either Alaska or Canada. Today this Native American line is found only in the Americas, with a strong frequency on the eastern coast of North America.”
Other experts, like professor Shelley Eli, dismisses the idea that this or any other Native American line migrated to the Americas from elsewhere at all, since their oral histories and indigenous histories cite nothing of the sort.
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“There’s no oral stories that say we crossed a bridge or anything else. We’ve always been here, since time immemorial.”
She gets her information from 2017 research that dated human activity in North America back more than 100,000 years.
The truth isn’t likely to be uncovered any time soon, but Crawford’s results remain an important moment for the scientific community. Before his tests came back, the oldest American DNA was 17,000 years younger than Crawford’s, and with new information comes the opportunity for better understanding.
As for Crawford himself, it’s a personal validation that what his family has always believed is true.
He does wish, though, that he and his brother could have marveled in that reality together.
