The Sioux Were Never Who We Thought — DNA Finally Revealed The Truth Sciopero 18 Maggio 2026 [DvuFj1pnGZk]

The Sioux Were Never Who We sarah ferguson Thought DNA Finally Revealed The Truth

In 2021, a team of geneticists led by Professor Eske Willerslev at the University of Cambridge published a study in Science Advances that confirmed something Ernie LaPointe had claimed his entire life. Using autosomal DNA extracted from a badly degraded lock of hair that had been sitting in the Smithsonian Institution since 1896 hair taken from the body of Sitting Bull after his death in 1890 the researchers matched the ancient genetic material to LaPointe and confirmed he is the great-grandson and closest living descendant of the Hunkpapa Lakota leader who defeated Custer at the Little Bighorn. It was the first time in history that a familial relationship between a living person and a historical individual had ever been confirmed using such limited and degraded ancient DNA across such distant relatives. The technique took fourteen years to develop. But what the Sitting Bull DNA study opened was not just a genealogical confirmation it opened a window into the genome of the Sioux people themselves, and into a much larger body of ancient DNA research from the Great Plains that has since revealed where the Sioux actually came from, how long they have been in the land they are associated with, and why the story that generations of Americans have been taught about one of the most mythologized peoples in the history of this continent is far more complex, far more ancient, and far more surprising than anyone expected.

The ancestors of the Sioux did not emerge from the Great Plains. The genetic and linguistic evidence together show they arrived there the Siouan language family traces its probable homeland to the eastern woodlands, thousands of miles from the Black Hills, and the demographic transformation that placed the Lakota on the northern plains as its dominant military power happened within the last few centuries, accelerated dramatically by the arrival of the horse in the early eighteenth century. The Anzick-1 child, an infant buried in Montana 12,800 years ago whose genome was sequenced by Morten Rasmussen and colleagues in 2014 and published in Nature, carries the primary ancestral signal from which most modern Native Americans descend including the Sioux but between Anzick-1 and the world of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull lay a series of demographic transformations involving population replacements, migrations, and genetic events that the range ancient bones of the Great Plains are only beginning to reveal. And the 2018 study by Moreno-Mayar, Willerslev, and colleagues in Science, analyzing ancient DNA from across the Americas, found that even the founding migration itself was not a single event from a single population the first Americans carried a complex layered ancestry including a genetic signal related to populations from Australia and Melanesia that no simple Bering land bridge model ever predicted. The Sioux were never who we thought. Because who they are reaches back through layers of migration and demographic transformation stretching tens of thousands of years before the first European ever arrived on this continent.

This video is based entirely on peer-reviewed research. The primary sources are the 2021 study by Ida Moltke, Thorfinn Korneliussen, Andaine Seguin-Orlando, J. Victor Moreno-Mayar, Ernie LaPointe, William Billeck, and Eske Willerslev, Identifying a living great-grandson of the Lakota Sioux leader Tatanka Iyotake (Sitting Bull), published in Science Advances, volume 7, issue 44, available at The 2014 study by Morten Rasmussen and colleagues, The genome of a Late Pleistocene human from a Clovis burial site in western Montana, published in Nature, volume 506, available at The 2018 study by J. Victor Moreno-Mayar, Eske Willerslev, and colleagues, Early human dispersals within the Americas, published in Science, volume 362, available at And the 2012 study by David Reich and colleagues, Reconstructing Native American population history, published in Nature, volume 488, available at All content is daniel levy based on published scientific studies. Ancient DNA Files does not take political or religious positions on any of the debates covered in this video. We follow the genetic evidence wherever it leads. New videos every week subscribe so you don't miss one.

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