Ancient DNA Shows Humans Settled Caribbean in 2 Distinct Waves
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
In order to make the "boring" parts of Taíno genetic research interesting to your casual reader some magazines sell this false romanticized narrative about Puerto Ricans using DNA to learn the Taíno history that was denied to them.
But in reality every Puerto Rican gets taught in school that they are a mix of Taíno, Spaniard, and African. It's a gross oversimplification but that's how Puerto Rican identity is built by the school system. And this isn't something new. I learned this story in school in the 80s. My parents learned it in the 40s. Our colloquial demonyms Boricua, Borinqueño, and Borincano are derived from Taíno words.
What we are told that went extinct is the direct cultural lineage of the Taíno, and this is true. Taíno women were taken as "wives" by the conquerors, and this was confirmed by DNA research, and their children were raised in Spanish culture and traditions. Virtually all that we know about Taíno culture comes from Spanish historians, Taíno remains, and a few artifacts. Throughout most of our history we were raised without Taíno elders or teachers.
What these articles reveal are specifics about genetic composition, distribution, migration paths, etc. And all of that is wonderful. I just wish that these magazines published those discoveries without lying about how Puerto Ricans are ignorant of their past and genetic composition to make the articles more appealing. It's appalling.
Huh? Virtually every Puerto Rican consider themselves to have Taino/Indigenous blood. There are even popular sayings like "Se me salio lo Taino" (_I left my internal Taino to come out_) which acknowledge the perpetuation in PR genetic pool of native people. BTW this is something not exclusive to PR, it happens all across latin america.
It's always "interesting" to me to hear Americans talk about this sort of stuff, because the way they are taught is that Spaniards were extremely more violent and cruel than their English counterparts, and yet, the US/Canada exterminated their native population down to 1% or so, while all the massacres and crimes in Latin-America were not enough to wipe out the native component, which can be as high as 50-65% in several countries.
Interesting. I think it’s often overlooked that the people we think of as being originally from a place often weren’t. The American mainland was settled by three waves of people before the Europeans came.
It is not overlooked, people simply use normally a different criterion of what you use.
This may be novel research but the article is bringing up information that I already knew 4 years ago, explained to me by the Kalinago historian.
> Humans settled the Caribbean about 6,000 years ago, and ceramic use and intensified agriculture mark a shift from the Archaic to the Ceramic Age at around 2,500 years ago. Here we report genome-wide data from 174 ancient individuals from The Bahamas, Haiti and the Dominican Republic (collectively, Hispaniola), Puerto Rico, Curaçao and Venezuela, which we co-analysed with 89 previously published ancient individuals. Stone-tool-using Caribbean people, who first entered the Caribbean during the Archaic Age, derive from a deeply divergent population that is closest to Central and northern South American individuals; contrary to previous work, we find no support for ancestry contributed by a population related to North American individuals. Archaic-related lineages were >98% replaced by a genetically homogeneous ceramic-using population related to speakers of languages in the Arawak family from northeast South America; these people moved through the Lesser Antilles and into the Greater Antilles at least 1,700 years ago, introducing ancestry that is still present. Ancient Caribbean people avoided close kin unions despite limited mate pools that reflect small effective population sizes, which we estimate to be a minimum of 500–1,500 and a maximum of 1,530–8,150 individuals on the combined islands of Puerto Rico and Hispaniola in the dozens of generations before the individuals who we analysed lived. Census sizes are unlikely to be more than tenfold larger than effective population sizes, so previous pan-Caribbean estimates of hundreds of thousands of people are too large. Confirming a small and interconnected Ceramic Age population, we detect 19 pairs of cross-island cousins, close relatives buried around 75 km apart in Hispaniola and low genetic differentiation across islands. Genetic continuity across transitions in pottery styles reveals that cultural changes during the Ceramic Age were not driven by migration of genetically differentiated groups from the mainland, but instead reflected interactions within an interconnected Caribbean world.
The “Ceramics” were an Arawak [2] speaking culture:
> Arawakan speakers in the Caribbean were also historically known as the Taíno, a term meaning "relatives". The Spanish assumed some islanders used this term to distinguish their group from the neighbouring Island Caribs [3].
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-03053-2