Ancient DNA Shows Humans Settled Caribbean in 2 Distinct Waves - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...dna-caribbean-islands.html
caribbean dna research language origins human origins American Indian native americans
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Before the advent of Caribbean genetic studies, archaeologists provided most of the clues about the origins of people in the region. The first human residents of the Caribbean appear to have lived mostly as hunter-gatherers, catching game on the islands and fishing at sea while also maintaining small gardens of crops.
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Archaeologists have discovered a few burials of those ancient people. Starting in the early 2000s, geneticists managed to fish out a few tiny bits of preserved DNA in their bones. Significant advances in recent years have made it possible to pull entire genomes from ancient skeletons.
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The genes of the oldest known residents of the Caribbean link them with the earliest populations that settled in Central and South America.
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Part of the problem is that scientists have yet to find ancient DNA in the Caribbean that is more than 3,000 years old
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About 2,500 years ago, the archaeological record shows, there was a drastic shift in the cultural life of the Caribbean. People started living in bigger settlements, intensively farming crops like maize and sweet potatoes. Their pottery became more sophisticated and elaborate. For archaeologists, the change indicates the end of what they call the Archaic Age and the start of a Ceramic Age.
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The skeletons from the Ceramic Age largely shared a new genetic signature. Their DNA links them to small tribes still living today in Colombia and Venezuela.
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We don’t know a lot about these languages, although some words have managed to survive. Hurricane, for example, comes from hurakán, the Taino name for the god of storms.
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The people bearing Ceramic Age ancestry came to dominate the Caribbean, with almost no interbreeding between the two groups.
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These words bear a striking resemblance to words from a family of languages in South America called Arawak. The DNA of the Ceramic Age Caribbeans most closely resembles that of living Arawak speakers.
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the new DNA findings had surprised him in many ways, giving him a host of new questions to investigate.
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Over the course of the Ceramic Age, for example, strikingly new pottery styles emerged every few centuries. Researchers have long guessed that those shifts reflect the arrival of new groups of people in the islands. The ancient DNA doesn’t support that idea, though. There’s a genetic continuity through those drastic cultural changes. It appears that the same group of people in the Caribbean went through a series of major social changes that archaeologists have yet to explain.
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Dr. Reich and his fellow geneticists also discovered family ties that spanned the Caribbean during the Ceramic Age. They found 19 pairs of people on different islands who shared identical segments of DNA — a sign that they were fairly close relatives. In one case, they found long-distance cousins from the Bahamas and Puerto Rico, separated by over 800 miles.
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“The original idea was that people start in one place, they establish a colony someplace else, and then they just cut all ties to where they came from,” Dr. Keegan said. “But the genetic evidence is suggesting that these ties were maintained over a long period of time.”
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Rather than being made up of isolated communities, in other words, the Caribbean was a busy, long-distance network that people regularly traveled by dugout canoe. “The water is like a highway,”
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The genetic variations also allowed Dr. Reich and his colleague to estimate the size of the Caribbean society before European contact. Christopher Columbus’s brother Bartholomew sent letters back to Spain putting the figure in the millions
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The DNA suggests that was an exaggeration: the genetic variations imply that the total population was as low as the tens of thousands.
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now, with a population of about 44 million people, the Caribbean may contain more Taino DNA than it did in 1491.
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Dr. Aviles and his colleagues have uploaded the ancient Caribbean genomes to a genealogical database called GEDMatch. With the help of genealogists, people can compare their own DNA to the ancient genomes. They can see the matching stretches of genetic material that reveal their relatedness.