A Native American Man Was Found To Have The Oldest American DNA Ever Recorded
TwitterDarrell “Dusty” Crawford had tested his DNA at the behest of his late brother, who died before the stunning results came back.
Darrell “Dusty” Crawford got his DNA tested at his brother’s urging, just before his brother died. And it turned out that his DNA results were so astounding that CRI Genetics, the company that traced his ancestry, said that it was like finding Bigfoot.
The company’s analysis indicated that Crawford, a member of the Blackfeet tribe in Montana, could trace his American ancestry back 55 generations, making his the oldest American DNA ever discovered.
It’s a bittersweet discovery for Crawford, who merely did the DNA test to assuage his late brother Alvin “Willy” Crawford, who lived on the Blackfeet reservation in Heart Butte, Montana. Unfortunately, Willy passed away before the brothers could receive the stunning news of their ancestry.
“He’s the one who encouraged me to do this, and he wanted to compare our results,” said Crawford. “I just wish I could have shown it to him. It would have blown him away.”
Crawford’s mitochondrial DNA, which is passed down from mothers to their children, is part of the Haplogroup B2, a genetic population subset which originated in Arizona about 17,000 years ago. The genetic footprints of this population subset are so rare that the closest relatives of his ancestral clan — the Ina clan — outside the West are only found in Southeast Asia.
CRI Genetics believes his ancestors came from Asia via the Pacific islands, landed in South America and migrated north to the present-day United States.
The majority of historians believe Native Americans originated from populations in Siberia who walked across a now-sunken land mass that connected Asia and Alaska, known as the Bering Strait, but Crawford’s results add a new layer to that theory.
“We’ve always been here, since time immemorial,” said Shelly Eli, who teaches Piikani culture at the Blackfeet Community College. “There’s no oral stories that say we crossed a bridge or anything else.”
