Native American Origins Traced Back to Siberia Using 24,000-year-old DNA [VIDEO]

A DNA study of a skeleton believed to date back 24,000 years suggests the first inhabitants of the Americas came directly from Siberia, circumventing Europe as previously expressed by some researchers.

The remains, which belong to a young boy, were discovered in the late 1920s near the village of Mal'ta in south-central Siberia. For decades, researchers simply referred to him as "the Mal'ta child" as his sex remained unknown until the recent analysis.

Published in the journal Nature, the study revealed that nearly 30 percent of modern Native American's ancestry come from the boy's gene pool.

"It shows he had close genetic ties to today's Native Americans and some western Eurasians, specifically some groups living in central Asia, South Asia, and Europe," Kelly Graf, an assistant professor at the Center for the Study of First Americans, said in a statement.

According to the results, the boy is genetically similar to groups living in European Russia, Czech Republic and Germany during the Ice Age.

"We think these Ice-Age people were quite mobile and capable of maintaining a far-reaching gene pool that extended from central Siberia all the way west to central Europe," she explained.

The oldest human genome ever completed, the study explains why early Native American skeletons were interpreted as having European traits, according to the researchers. However, it does not answer the question as to when humans entered Alaska and, ultimately, North America.

"Though our results cannot speak directly to this debate," Graf said, "they do indicate Native American ancestors could have been in Beringia -- extreme northeastern Russia and Alaska -- any time after 24,000 years ago and therefore could have colonized Alaska and the Americas much earlier than 14,500 years ago, the age suggested by the archaeological record."

The researchers argue that two groups, one related to modern-day East Asians and the other to modern-day western Eurasians, form the genetic foundation for those first inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere.

"The result came as a complete surprise to us," Eske Willerslev from the Center for GeoGenetics said. "Who would have thought that present-day Native Americans, who we learned in school derive from East Asians, share recent evolutionary history with contemporary western Eurasians?"