>>8592808This doesn't mean what you think it means. It means that descendants of the original hunter-gatherers of Europe, best represented in modern Swedes (it would be interesting to know if the Sami are even more closely descended from this population) at some point made it across the Bering land bridge, or interbred with people who later crossed it. The other main group at that time from which modern Europeans descend is early European farmers, best represented by today's Sardinians and the Basque. The early farmers (I think) are probably more direct ancestors to Indo-Europeans, and these are not at all closely related to Native Americans. Vikings came way, way later, by the way.
>Today the hunter-gathering ancestral population of Europe appears to have its closest affinity to people in far Northeastern Siberia and Native Americans. This just supports the idea I outlined above. NA descend at least partially from these hunter-gatherers, and not the first European farmers who came later. Swedes are just the European population they studied that was most descended from these hunter-gatherers and least descended from early Farmers, which makes sense given the geographical location and climate of Sweden at that time in the past. Again, I wonder whether the Sami people of northern Scandinavia are even more closely related to Native Americans than white Swedes.
Although, this could mean that NA aren't very closely related to the Chinese at all, which I would accept if you could show me a good study comparing genetic distances between unmixed European, East Asian, and Native American populations. The study you linked before does not say that NA are more closely related to Swedes than Chinese. However, it is still interesting that there is a distant link to Europe.
