Pacific Biologies: How Humans Become Genetic

Abstract

The announcement in 2016 that Eske Willerslev's laboratory at the University of Cambridge had sequenced genomes of 83 Aboriginal Australians caused quite a stir, exciting discussion in newspapers, radio, television, and social media across the southern continent. Published in Nature, the article traced the ancient divergence of Aboriginal and Papuan (New Guinea Highlander) populations from Eurasians, and the slightly more recent splitting and isolation of the Australians from their Papuan neighbors. The investigatorsa multinational team, many of them Indigenous-deduced from these genomes that there had been a single colonization event, from which all Aboriginal Australians descended. Although they discerned subsequent European, Asian, and Melanesian genetic mixtures in samples, the nucleic-acid residues of such complicating ancestries could be set aside and discounted in the analysis. 1 One of the authors, Thomas Wales, an Aboriginal elder from Mapoon on Cape York, observed, "We have an oral history, that everyone knows, and you can lose all your oral [history]. Science, and DNA, and carbon dating . . . you can keep hold of things, tell us about our past." Many Indigenous people had come to regard genetics as confirming, or even