Using the largest study of ancient Caribbean DNA to engagement , investigator have exuviate igniter on the Caribbean ’s first islanders and pieced together the taradiddle of how the archipelago became inhabit thousands of geezerhood ago . Like manyother ancient DNA studies , it ’s upended some old assumptions about the past and institute raw enquiry to the table .
As reported in the journalNature , a multi - national team of geneticist , archaeologists , and anthropologists , including Caribbean - based researchers , have analyzed the genomes of 174 new and 89 previously sequenced the great unwashed who populate in the Bahamas , Haiti , the Dominican Republic , Puerto Rico , Curaçao , and Venezuela , between 400 and 3,100 old age ago . They get particular permission to carry out the study from local governments and cultural institutions who act as caretaker of the remains , involve representatives of Caribbean Indigenous community of interests in the discussion of their finding .
meld with archaeological discoveries , they found that the first human settler in the Caribbean seem to be a group of stone instrument - users who sailed to Cuba about 6,000 years ago at the start of the area ’s Archaic Age . The precise identity element of these first inhabitants stay unclear . While they appear to bear some genetic resemblance to people in Central and South America , not North America , their deoxyribonucleic acid could not be matched to any known Indigenous chemical group .
However , archeologic evidence does hint at some connection to other voice of the Americas . The researcher note that artifacts in Cuba are strikingly interchangeable to those line up in Belize , a Caribbean nation in mainland Central America , suggesting there could be some contact to other parts of Central America , as opposed to South America .
A second major wave of migration appear to usher in the Ceramic eld when more sea - farers from the northeast coast of South America voyaged to the Caribbean island some 2,500 years ago , belike firstsettling in Puerto Rico before move westward . During this sentence , the Caribbean island were home to highly wandering people , with distant congenator often know on different islands .
Among their central findings , the team also let on that the population found in the Caribbean ’s largest island , Hispaniola and Puerto Rico , appear to be astonishingly little during this time , likely no more than a few tens of G of people . This stands in gross dividing line tothe reports of 16th - century European historians who argued that millions of people inhabited the islands at the time of their arrival . However , the researchers were quick to stress that this smaller universe should not downplay thecatastrophic shock of European colonization on endemic Caribbean culture .
" This was a systematic program of cultural expunction . The fact that the number was not 1 million or millions of people , but rather ten of grand , does not make that erasure any less meaning , " David Reich , professor of genetics at the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School , said in astatement .
The genetic legacy of these migrant waves can still be detect in the neighborhood today . Sifting through this genetic data , it was found that people living in some percentage of Cuba , Dominican Republic , and Puerto Rica still bear genetic episode that come from Ceramic Age people , as well as DNA inherited from colonizing Europeans and multitude of African origin who were unwillingly bring to this part of the world duringthe trans - Atlantic slave craft . unco , however , there was scantily any genic ghost of Archaic Age ancestry in modern - day mass .
" That ’s a enceinte enigma , " William Keegan , work atomic number 27 - author and conservator at the Florida Museum of Natural History . " For Cuba , it ’s specially curious that we do n’t see more Archaic line . "
