A genetic history of the pre-contact Caribbean

Abstract

These authors contributed equally to this work. Humans settled the Caribbean ~6,000 years ago, with intensified agriculture and ceramic use marking a shift from the Archaic Age to the Ceramic Age ~2,500 years ago. To shed new light on the history of Caribbean people, we report genome-wide data from 184 individuals predating European contact from The Bahamas, Cuba, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, Curaçao, and northwestern Venezuela. A largely homogeneous ceramic-using population most likely originating in northeastern South America and related to present-day Arawak-speaking groups moved throughout the Caribbean at least 1,800 years ago, spreading ancestry that is still detected in parts of the region today. These people eventually almost entirely replaced Archaic-related lineages in Hispaniola but not in northwestern Cuba, where unadmixed Archaic-related ancestry persisted into the last millennium. We document high mobility and inter-island connectivity throughout the Ceramic Age as reflected in relatives buried ~75 kilometers apart in Hispaniola and low genetic differentiation across many Caribbean islands, albeit with subtle population structure distinguishing the Bahamian islands we studied from the rest of the Caribbean and from each other, and long-term population continuity in southeastern coastal Hispaniola differentiating this region from the rest of the island. Ceramic-associated people avoided close kin unions despite limited mate pools reflecting low effective population sizes (2Ne=1000-2000) even at sites on the large Caribbean islands. While census population sizes can be an order of magnitude larger than effective population sizes, pan-Caribbean population size estimates of hundreds of thousands are likely too large. Transitions in pottery styles show no evidence of being driven by waves of migration of new people from mainland South America; instead, they more likely reflect the spread of ideas and people within an interconnected Caribbean world.

Ecological Consequences of a Millennium of Introduced Dogs on Madagascar

“…All bones were mechanically cleaned, demineralized in 0.5 N hydrochloric acid (HCl) under refrigeration, and gelatinized in 0.01 N HCl at 60 • C. Collagen from the bone of subfossil individuals was purified through ultrafiltration (14 samples, Beaumont et al, 2010;Fernandes et al, 2021) or purification with XAD resin (17 samples, Supplementary Dataset 1, Stafford et al, 1988Stafford et al, , 1991Lohse et al, 2014). When collagen is relatively intact and yields are high, ultrafiltration can purify a sample by mechanically removing the smaller (<30 kDa) fraction, which includes degraded collagen and exogenous contaminants (Higham et al, 2006).…”

Y Haplogroup Diversity of the Dominican Republic: Reconstructing the Effect of the European Colonization and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trades

“…These human groups were probably the ancestors of Tainos, the people inhabiting the Greater Antilles when the European colonists arrived in the XV century. The exact population size of the Tainos at the arrival of the European colonists is hard to estimate: numbers ranging from 100,000 to 1,000,000 have been proposed ( Anderson-Córdova 1990 , 2017 ; Guitar 2002 ), although a recent study based on ancient DNA led to an estimate of 10,000–20,000 individuals ( Fernandes et al. 2020 ).…”

Human arrival and landscape dynamics in the northern Bahamas

“…The earliest known Lucayan settlements in The Bahamas are the Three Dog Site on San Salvador, which was occupied from 600 to 900 CE (2σ range) ( 6 ), and the Coralie Site on Grand Turk, occupied 650 to 885 CE (2σ range) ( 7 ). Lucayan populations at the time of Columbus’s arrival in 1492 CE on San Salvador (called Guanahani by native Taíno people) most likely numbered in the tens of thousands ( 8 ), with lower population densities in the drier southernmost islands ( 2 , 7 ). Within 30 y, the population of The Bahamas had been greatly reduced by disease and Spanish enslavement to provide labor on Hispaniola and Cuba ( 9 ).…”