A Boy’s Life
Kelly Graf
DNA extracted ds goo from the remains ve a r g ng i d lu inc of a 24,000-year-old ial, r u b y o ab boy found in Russia al’t M e f th o tion links modern Native Americans ruc t s n eco r A to Eurasian populations. By David Malakoff
U
ltimately, archeologists may thank a Siberian farmer for helping settle a long and often contentious debate over where the first Americans came from. In the late 1920s, the farmer—identified as Saveliev by some historians—was digging a cellar in the village of Mal’ta, some 100 miles northwest of Lake Baikal in Siberia. His shovel hit a huge animal bone locked in the icy soil. With little fanfare, he tossed the annoying obstacle into a yard, where some delighted kids began playing with it. Eventually, word of the curiosity reached a museum in the city
american archaeology
of Irkutsk, some 50 miles away. On a frigid February day in 1928, it dispatched a young scholar to investigate. Mikhail Mikhaylovich Gerasimov was just 20, but he had already been excavating archaeological sites in the region for nearly a decade, publishing his first technical paper at 17. What the whiz kid found in Mal’ta amazed him, remaking not only his career but also our understanding of early human cultures. Over the next 30 years, research teams would uncover a spectacular trove of art, tools, dwellings, and graves. They were created by people who lived along
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