Aug 29, 2014 10:54 AM EDT By Russell Westerholm, UniversityHerald Reporter

A new study sequencing the DNA of both ancient and living "Paleo-Eskimo" descendants suggest all related cultures came from one migration from Siberia.

According to BBC News, the multi-institutional study is published in the journal Science. More than 50 authors collaborated on the work to find that the modern-day Inuit and Native American were not of the same migration as the Paleo-Eskimos.

"One might almost say, kind of jokingly and very informally, that the Dorsets were the 'hobbits' of the Eastern Arctic, a very strange and very conservative people that we're only just getting to know a little bit," study co-author William Fitzhugh, an anthropologist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, told NBC News.

Much research has been conducted on the lineages of North American Arctic cultures and how they originated, to what they hunted and how they diverged.

"Since the 1920s or so, it has been heavily discussed what is the relationship between these cultural groups," study senior author Eske Willerslev, a professor at the University of Copenhagen, told BBC News. "All kinds of hypotheses have been proposed. Everything from complete continuity between the first people in the Arctic to present-day Inuits, [while] other researchers have argued that the Saqqaq and the Dorset and the Thule are distinct people."

The researchers collected DNA from the remains of 150 ancient humans, which proved that both the Saqqaq and Dorset peoples traveled across the Bering Strait from Siberia as one Paleo-Eskimo group 6,000 years ago. What is now the Bering Strait was once a land bridge called Beringia, which allowed the Paleo-Eskimos to migrate from Sibera to North America.

"A single founding population settled, and endured the harsh environmental conditions of the Arctic, for almost 5,000 years," study first author Maanasa Raghavan told BBC News, "during which time the culture and lifestyle changed enough to be represented as distinct cultural units."

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