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New genetic studies from remote Pacific islands offer fresh insights into the ancestry and culture of the world’s earliest seafarers, including the family structure, social customs and ancestral populations of people living there today.
The work described in sciencereveals five previously undocumented migrations in a subregion of this area and suggests that, about 2,500 to 3,500 years ago, the early inhabitants of these Pacific islands—including Guam in the northern region and Vanuatu in the southwest—had matrilocal population structures in which women were almost always remained in their communities after marriage, while men more often moved from their mothers’ communities to live with their wives’.
The practice is different from that of patrilocal societies, where women predominate over those who leave their own community. These findings support the idea that the world’s earliest seafarers were organized along female lines.
The results come from whole-genome analysis of 164 ancient individuals from 2,800 to 300 years ago, as well as 112 modern individuals. It was published by a team of researchers led jointly by Harvard geneticists David Reich and Yue-Chen Liu, Ron Pinhasi of the University of Vienna, and Rosalind Hunter-Anderson, an independent researcher based in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Ms. Alyssa Taitano talks about her experiences as a young scientist and a Chamorro woman involved in the Micronesian Ancient DNA Project Posted on July 1, 2022 Courtesy: Rosalind Hunter-Anderson, Ph.D., National Geographic Fellow Society
“It’s an unexpected gift to be able to learn about cultural patterns from genetic data,” said David Reich, professor in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology and professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School. “Today, traditional Pacific communities have both patrilocal and matrilocal population structures, and there has been debate about what was the usual practice in ancestral populations. These results suggest that matrilocality was the rule among the earliest seafarers.
Genetic analysis compared early seafarers from Guam, Vanuatu and Tonga – who lived about 2,500 to 3,000 years ago – revealed that their mitochondrial DNA sequences, which people inherit only from their biological mother, differed almost completely, while sharing much more than the rest of DNA. The only way this could happen is if the migrants who left their communities to marry new ones were almost always men.
“Females certainly moved to new islands, but when they did, they were part of joint movements of both females and males,” Reich explains. “This pattern of community departure must have been almost unique to males to explain why genetic differentiation is so much higher in mitochondrial DNA than in the rest of the genome.”
New research by an interdisciplinary team of geneticists and archaeologists quintuples the array of ancient DNA data from the vast Pacific region called Remote Oceania, the last habitable place on earth to be inhabited. It also provides surprising insights into the highly complex habitation of one of the major subregions of Remote Oceania.
Humans arrived and spread across Australia, New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago and the Solomon Islands beginning 50,000 years ago, but it wasn’t until 3,500 years ago that humans began living in remote Oceania for the first time, having developed technology for crossing open water in unique canoes for long distances.
This extension includes the region called Micronesia: about two thousand small islands north of the Equator, including Guam, the Marshall Islands, the Caroline Islands, Palau, and the Northern Mariana Islands.
The routes by which people arrived in the region have long been a mystery. Uncovering five streams of migration in Micronesia helps to clarify this mystery and the origins of people there today.
“These migrations that we document with ancient DNA are the key events shaping the unique history of this region,” said Liu, a postdoctoral fellow in Reich’s lab and lead author of the study. “Some of the findings were very surprising.”
Of the five migrations detected, three are from East Asia, one from Polynesia and Papuan ancestors coming from the northern fringes of mainland New Guinea. The New Guinea ancestry was a big surprise, since a different stream of this migration—one from New Britain, an island chain east of New Guinea—was the source of Papuan ancestry in the southwest Pacific and in Central Micronesia.
The researchers also found that the present-day indigenous people of the Mariana Islands in Micronesia, including Guam and Saipan, derive almost all of their pre-European contact ancestry from two of the East Asian-related migrations the researchers found. This makes them “the only people from the open Pacific who do not originate from the New Guinea region,” Liu said.
The researchers consulted with several indigenous communities in Micronesia for the study. This is the fourth publication of original ancient DNA data from remote Pacific islands by Reich’s group.
“It’s important when we’re doing work with ancient DNA that we don’t just write a paper about the population history of a region and then move on,” Reich said. “Each paper raises as many new questions as it answers, and this requires a long-term commitment to follow up on the original findings.” In the Pacific Islands, there are so many open questions, so many surprises yet to be discovered.”
Ancient DNA sheds light on Mariana Islands settlement More information: Yue-Chen Liu et al, Ancient DNA reveals five streams of migration in Micronesia and matrilocality in early Pacific seafarers, science (2022). DOI: 10.1126/science.abm6536. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm6536 Courtesy of Harvard University
Citation: Ancient DNA yields surprising discoveries about world’s earliest seafarers (2022, June 30) Retrieved June 30, 2022, from
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