Genetic Change in South Patagonia over Seven Millennia

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Increasing the Accessibility of Ancient DNA within Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

South Patagonia, the austral extreme of South America, has been inhabited for at least 12,600 years. Following European contact, five ethnic groups of hunter-gatherers (Yámana, Kawéskar, Selk’nam, Haush, and Aónikenk) were documented. They based their subsistence on two broad strategies optimized for maritime or terrestrial resources. After a century of fieldwork, archaeologists have revealed a complex pattern of differentiation between groups. Many questions regarding peopling, admixture and technological changes remain to be answered. In order to provide some hints into these questions, we generated genome-wide data from 20 ancient individuals and compared it to previously reported data. We observed a shared genetic ancestry between maritime and terrestrial Middle Holocene individuals (~6600–5800 BP) that persists in some Late Holocene groups. We also identified two migration events that reached South Patagonia: a first wave by at least ~4700 BP that differentiated Late Holocene maritime groups from terrestrial ones, and gene flow with Central Chile around 2000 BP, which impacted both terrestrial and maritime groups. Finally, Late Holocene groups fall on a genetic cline precisely correlated to geographic ordering following the coastal line, as a result of the uneven impact of these two migration processes.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Increasing the Accessibility of Ancient DNA within Archaeology

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32287