Ancient Taino genome sheds new light on the peopling of the Caribbean

Summary

The Tainos were the first people to encounter Columbus when he set foot in the New World. The Taino culture emerged in the Caribbean around 1200 CE but the ancestral origins of the Tainos remain a matter of debate. Some scholars believe that the ancestors of the Tainos originated in the Amazon Basin, while others contend that they may have spread from the Colombian Andes via a Circum-Caribbean route. Theoretically, the ancestors of the Tainos could have entered the Caribbean from, any or all parts of the American mainland, including North, Central and South America. Ancient DNA holds the key to solving this problem, as we can directly test some of the hypotheses put forward by archeologists and linguists. However, until now ancient DNA studies in the Caribbean have been hampered by poor preservation. Here we report the genome sequence of a thousand-year-old (894-1017 cal AD, 95% prob.) Lucayan-Taino individual whose remains were recovered from the site of Preacher's Cave in the Bahamas. We sequenced the genome to an average depth of 10.8× and show that the ancestry of the Taino can be reliably traced to the fluvial settlements of the Upper Orinoco Valley in South America.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Primer of the Ancient Mariner: New Perspectives on aDNA Research and the Prehistoric Colonization of Islands

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