http://web.archive.org/web/20010127113500/http://www.abcnews.go.com/sections/science/DailyNews/skeleton_ohio001127.html

   Sinkhole Skeleton
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   Skeleton's DNA Could Shed Light on American Migrations
   The Associated Press

   VANLUE, Ohio, Nov. 27 -- The discovery of prehistoric tools from
   an Ohio cave is one of several finds that has scientists questioning
   the identity of settlers thought to have moved in 11,000 years ago.

       A just completed excavation of Sheriden Cave in Wyandot County,
   100 miles southwest of Cleveland, revealed tools made from flaked
   stone and bone. The items are scheduled to go on display next year at
   the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.

        Kent State University archaeologist Kenneth Tankersley, who led
   the excavation over the past four years, said definite answers won't
   come until someone finds an Ice Age skeleton and the DNA is tested.

   Rare Genetic Link to Europe

   "Disagreement swirls around the timing of their arrival, the nature of
   their migration, how fast they moved across the landscape and their
   relationship to contemporary Native Americans," he said.

        Some scientists think that the earliest colonizers could have
   started out somewhere in Europe, not in Asia as previously thought.
   That idea is rooted in a rare genetic link called haplogroup X - DNA
   passed down through women that dates back more than 30,000 years.

        Recent genetic samples from remains in Illinois show that the
   rare European DNA was around centuries before European exploration.
   Today, haplogroup X is found in about 20,000 American Indians.

        To some researchers, its presence suggests the Mongolian
   ancestors of most American Indians were latecomers. Genetic tests show
   the DNA is completely absent from East Asian and Siberian populations.

        That could dispel the more than half-century old notion that
   humans migrated across a land bridge from Siberia at the end of the
   Ice Age, made stone tools and hunted while moving south.

        Archaeologists since 1996 have found genetic indications of
   several migrations, along with evidence that people came from
   Polynesia, regions near Japan and even western Europe.

   Skeleton Has Scientists Jumpy

   "Frankly, it makes me nervous," Smithsonian Institution anthropologist
   Stephen Loring said of the idea that the first Americans during the
   Ice Age were of European ancestry. "It's a heretical argument, and
   some people, unfortunately, will use it to assert the cultural
   superiority of Europeans. But it's a good theory that needs to be
   tested."

        Tankersley and Brian Redmond, head of archaeology at the
   Cleveland Natural History Museum, have been seeking clues about the
   first colonizers from the cave, which is hidden 50 feet below
   cornfields.

        "To find human remains of that age, 11,000 years old, is really,
   really rare, and I don't think there are any in that cavern. We would
   have found them," Redmond said. But he added, "Who knows what may turn
   up in the future. We're certain it was a camping area."

        Farmers and landowners fear they could be tied up in litigation
   by preservationists and Indian tribes if old bones are disturbed.

        "We know of places where you could probably find human remains up
   here," said Keith Hendricks, a Hancock County sheriff's deputy whose
   family owns the sinkhole where the Ice Age relics have been recovered.
   "But the problem is you'd be opening a Pandora's box. It's a sensitive
   issue."