A groundbreaking new study published in the journal Nature indicates that everything we know about how the first Native Americans got here may be wrong. The findings are based on the DNA analysis of infant remains discovered in Alaska around five years ago, which suggests that the widely held belief among the scientific community of a single migration 20,000 years ago is faulty.

The girl, whose remains were dated to about 11,500 years ago, appears to be from an entirely different group of people than the group of settlers credited with populating early America. It’s a finding that suggests that there may have been at least two migrations to North America, and the one the girl belonged to stayed farther north for thousands of years longer.

Scientists believe they migrated to North America using the Beringia land bridge from Siberia. This new discovery could lead experts to rewrite the history books with regards to North America’s early human history.

“Direct genetic traces of the earliest Native Americans have been identified for the first time in a new study,” reads the statement from St. John’s College. “The genetic evidence suggests that people may have entered the continent in a single migratory wave, perhaps arriving more than 20,000 years ago. The data, which came from archaeological finds in Alaska, also points to the existence of a previously unknown Native American population, whom academics have named “Ancient Beringians”. The findings are being published in the journal Nature and present possible answers to a series of long-standing questions about how the Americas were first populated.”