Aztec Conquerors Reshaped Genetic Landscape of Mexico

LiveScience ^ | January 31, 2013 | Tia Ghose

[SunkenCiv]

The Aztecs who conquered the city of Xaltocan in ancient Mexico around 1435 may have fundamentally changed the genetic makeup of the people who lived there, new research suggests...

Xaltocan was the capital of a pre-Aztec city-state ruled by the Otomi, an indigenous people who lived in Mexico. The period before the Aztec conquest was a tumultuous time for the Otomi, when a century of warfare led to the collapse of their capital city.

Colonial records from the 1500s onward told tales of the Otomi fleeing the city en masse in 1395. Those records suggested that the city was abandoned until 1435, when the Aztecs, who ruled a massive empire from their capital city of Teotihuacan, brought their own taxpayers to repopulate the city.

But when Overholtzer and her colleagues began excavating in the region several years ago, none of the sites showed evidence that they were completely abandoned, Overholtzer told LiveScience...

To see if any changes occurred in who was living in the city, the team collected mitochondrial DNA, which can trace the maternal line of a family, from teeth and bones of 25 bodies that had been buried under the patios of two old houses in Xaltocan before, during and after the conquest. The houses likely belonged to commoners, Overholtzer said.

The maternal DNA from the hundred years before the conquest did not match that from decades after, suggesting that at least some of the Otomi left and were replaced by Aztec settlers, or that the Otomi radically reorganized their population on the land.

[SunkenCiv]

New DNA analysis of the bones from 25 individuals in Xaltocan suggest that the population changed after the Aztec conquest. CREDIT: Lisa Overholtzer, Wichita State University

[SunkenCiv]

GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach	join list or digest view topics view or post blog bookmark post a topic subscribe
Big surprise that a mass-murdering tribe would somehow have replaced another tribe that had been indigenous. Just adding to the catalog, not sending a general distribution. To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list.

[ClearCase_guy]

"It's likely that some people did leave, probably the elites who no longer had the same social roles," Overholzer said.

Well, that sure sounds familiar ...

[EveningStar]

Good article. Thanks for posting it. :)

[MestaMachine]

That’s a hell of an overbite there.

[beaversmom]

Ping

[Valpal1]

The maternal DNA from the hundred years before the conquest did not match that from decades after

Unless they were marrying their sisters, this is a big duh. Of course they raided or traded for women.

[exDemMom]

when the Aztecs ... brought their own taxpayers to repopulate the city.

I wonder if the author of this piece realizes just how much she revealed her liberal bias when she chose this language. A fundamental tenet of liberalism is the belief that people belong to government. This language strikes me as a strong expression of that belief.

Wouldn't a more neutral term have been "citizens" or "tribe members"?

Anyway... for the content of the article, it's interesting, but it also contains a bit of a "duh" factor. Human conquests throughout history have changed the genetic landscape of the areas that were conquered. Let's go back a few thousand years to when the people of Africa decided to move on to other continents--and found those Neanderthal people with whom they couldn't wait to mix genomes.