Death came as it did so often in prehistory -- in infancy.  Some
12,600 years ago as ice sheets pulled back their frozen embrace
of North America, a young boy, perhaps a year old, was buried
near a rocky outcropping in present-day Montana.  Although the
boy's bones were found nearly half a century ago, only now have
scientists succeeded in extracting and studying his DNA,
completing the oldest genome of a North American.  "This boy
tells us much about the epic journey of these first humans in
North America," said Michael Waters, a Texas A&M University
anthropologist involved in the biological analysis of the boy.
His genetic data confirms archaeological evidence that indicates
humans first came to the Americas sometime between 15,000 and
17,500 years ago. They crossed a land bridge between modern-day
Siberia and Alaska and then came down the West Coast into North
and then South America. They had reached Chile by about 14,400
years ago.  Waters, director of the Center for the Study of the
First Americans at T