Ancient DNA shines light on Caribbean prehistory

Stone Interchanges in the Bahama Archipelago: 'Long Journey's End' (© Merald Clark for SIBA) - An international team of scientists reveals the genetic makeup of the people who lived in the Caribbean between about 400 and 3,100 years ago-at once settling several archaeologic and anthropologic debates, illuminating present-day ancestries and reaching startling conclusions about Indigenous population sizes when Caribbean cultures were devastated by European colonialism beginning in the 1490s. About 6,000 years ago, at the start of the Archaic Age, humans first settled in the islands of the Caribbean. These individuals lived in what is now the Bahamas, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Guadeloupe, St. Lucia, Curaçao and Venezuela. Three to four thousand years later, stone tools gave way to clay pottery and the Ceramic Age began. Another two millennia passed before Europeans sailed across the Atlantic and made first contact. Where did these stone tool-using and clay-crafting populations come from? Were they related to each other? How many people lived in the Caribbean when the Spanish first arrived? How much, if any, ancestry can today's Caribbean populations trace back to these precontact Indigenous groups? New answers have emerged from this largest genome-wide study to date of ancient human DNA in the Americas. An international team of geneticists, archaeologists, anthropologists, physicists and museum curators, including Caribbean-based co-authors and in consultation with Caribbean people of Indigenous descent, analyzed the genomes of 174 new and 89 previously sequenced ancient people.