Excavation work in Canimar Abajo, Cuba. Credit: Esteban Grau Gonzalez
Posted on 06/13/2020 7:23:26 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
Pirates or no pirates, the islands of the Caribbean were settled and resettled by at least three successive waves of colonists from the American mainland, according to a new study.
The examination of ancient DNA from 93 islanders who lived between 400 and 3200 years ago reveals a complex population history and ties to broader, inter-continental human expansions in both North and South America, according to an international research team...
The Caribbean was one of the last regions in the Americas to be settled. Archaeological evidence suggests the first residents arrived about 8000 years ago, and that 3000 years later humans were widely dispersed.
However, much of the settlement history has relied on interpretations from archaeological findings, such as the stylistic comparison of artefact collections between Caribbean sites and those from the surrounding mainland...
To try to fill these gaps, a team led by Kathrin Nägele from Germany's Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History analysed the genomes of the 93 islanders using bone fragments excavated from 16 archaeological sites in Cuba, the Bahamas, Puerto Rico and Guadeloupe...
This leads them to believe that there were at least three different population dispersals into the region: two earlier dispersals into the western Caribbean, one of which seems to be linked to earlier population dispersals in North America, and a third, more recent wave, which originated in South America...
The researchers also report genetic differences between early settlers and newcomers from South America who, according to archaeological evidence, entered the region around 2800 years ago.
"Although the different groups were present in the Caribbean at the same time, we found surprisingly little evidence of admixture between them," says Cosimo Posth, from the Max Planck Institute.
(Excerpt) Read more at cosmosmagazine.com ...
Excavation work in Canimar Abajo, Cuba. Credit: Esteban Grau Gonzalez
Shameless photo-op.
“The examination of ancient DNA from 93 islanders who lived between 400 and 3200 years ago reveals a complex population history and ties to broader, inter-continental human expansions in both North and South America, according to an international research team...”
In other words, there were a series of murderous conquests...
....long before whitey showed up.
can’t be. whites are racists. haven’t you been keeping up with the media reports? /sarc
My theory is, any PreColumbian massacres were due to autogoals and perceived cheating.
There are rock engravings in Georgia and Puerto Rico that are very similar.
The Bahamas are in the Caribbean? Who knew? (Just a 180 miles or so off SE of Miami. Actually in the North Atlantic.)
The people who lived for thousands of years in the islands were called the Taino and Arawak.
The Carribs came later; that was the group who came up from South America. Probably from the Orinoco river and the part of Venezuela that is across from Trinidad.
These people were the “Cannibals”. The name is actually a European corruption of their word for themselves, the Carribs.
Of course, all of these waves of people respected each other’s culture. It wasn’t until Columbus came that massacres and genocide happened.... (sarc)
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