Prehistoric mitochondrial DNA of domesticate animals supports a 13th century exodus from the northern US southwest

Abstract

The 13th century Puebloan depopulation of the Four Corners region of the US Southwest is an iconic episode in world prehistory. Studies of its causes, as well as its consequences, have a bearing not only on archaeological method and theory, but also social responses to climate change, the sociology of social movements, and contemporary patterns of cultural diversity. Previous research has debated the demographic scale, destinations, and impacts of Four Corners migrants. Much of this uncertainty stems from the substantial differences in material culture between the Four Corners vs. hypothesized destination areas. Comparable biological evidence has been difficult to obtain due to the complete departure of farmers from the Four Corners in the 13th century CE and restrictions on sampling human remains. As an alternative, patterns of genetic variation among domesticated species were used to address the role of migration in this collapse. We collected mitochondrial haplotypic data from dog (Canis lupus familiaris) and turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) remains from archaeological sites in the most densely-populated portion of the Four Corners region, and the most commonly proposed destination area for that population under migration scenarios. Results are consistent with a large-scale migration of humans, accompanied by their domestic turkeys, during the 13th century CE. These results support scenarios that suggest contemporary Pueblo peoples of the Northern Rio Grande are biological and cultural descendants of Four Corners populations.

A New Kind of Relevance for Archaeology

“…We also compiled architectural, ceramic, and chronometric data for thousands of archaeological sites and used these data to estimate the population histories of our study areas at a temporal resolution approaching a single human generation Ortman, 2016b;Schwindt et al, 2016). We created time series for interpersonal violence rates, demographic rates and hunting pressure on wild game (Johnson et al, 2005;Kohler et al, 2008Kohler et al, , 2009Kohler and Reese, 2014), and we reconstructed patterns of settlement, community organization and migration into and out of our study areas (Glowacki and Ortman, 2012;Ortman, 2012;Glowacki, 2015;Kemp et al, 2017). Finally, we developed agent-based models that provide robust null models for assessing the effects of climate for demographic rates and social organization (Kohler, 2012;Kohler et al, 2012a;Crabtree et al, 2017).…”

Can we identify the Mexican hairless dog in the archaeological record? Morphological and genetic insights from Tizayuca, Basin of Mexico

“…The sequences produced in this study were then compared to 339 published sequences (Table S1) from American archaeological dogs (Ames et al, 2015;Barta, 2006;Brown et al, 2013;Kemp et al, 2017;Leonard et al, 2002;Thalmann et al, 2013;Witt et al, 2015), and Tajima's D test were assessed using DnaSP v.5.10 ( Librado and Rozas, 2009). Analysis of molecular variance (AMOVA) and pairwise F ST population comparison (using the Reynold's distance and Jukes and Cantor computation of the distance matrix, with a threshold of 0.05) were implemented in Arlequin v.3.5.2.2 (Excoffier et al, 1992;Excoffier and Lischer, 2010).…”

“…No other comparative Mesoamerican samples are available yet, but data from other regions in America enable large-scale comparison of genetic diversity. We used a set of 339 published comparative sequences of ancient and modern dogs (Table 4) Barta, 2006;Brown et al, 2006;Kemp et al, 2017;Leonard et al, 2002;Witt et al, 2015), with the addition of modern sequences (right; data from van Asch et al, 2013;Castroviejo et al, 2011;Vilà et al 1999); see colours in online version. Comparative sequences were truncated to the 173 bp analysed in this paper.…”

“…Among archaeological samples, those from Mesoamerica show the highest diversity (Hd = 0.92; = 0.0168; W = 4.51). Conversely, ancient dogs from Illinois (Thalmann et al, 2013;Witt et al, 2015) and from the American South West (Kemp et al, 2017) Table 4 -Measure of genetic diversity among the 347 dogs compared in this study, for a 173 bp sequence of the CR: number of individuals (n), number of segregating sites (S), number of different haplotypes (h), haplotype diversity (Hd), nucleotide diversity ( ) and Watterson's estimator ( W ) with associated standard deviation ( ). Mesoamerican dogs (this study, Leonard et al, 2002) are compared to Alaska (Brown, 2006;Leonard et al, 2002), Illinois (Thalmann et al, 2013;Witt et al, 2015), North Pacific Coast (Barta, 2006;Ames et al, 2015), American South West (Kemp et al, 2017;Witt et al, 2015) and South American (Leonard et al, 2002, Thalmann et al, 2013 archaeological populations, and with modern dogs of American origin (indigenous and pure breed, van Asch et al, 2013;Castroviejo et al, 2011;Vilà et al 1999).…”

Finding Archaeology in 2017: What Is Archaeology and Why Are We Doing It? Why Should We Be Doing It?

“…), but also to look at other less typical issues, including human migrations (Kemp et al. ) and trade (Star et al. ).…”