A genetic history of the pre-contact Caribbean

Posted in Articles, Caribbean/Latin America, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation on 2021-01-05 00:44Z by Steven

A genetic history of the pre-contact Caribbean

Nature
2020-12-23
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-03053-2

D.M. Fernandes

K.A. Sirak

H. Ringbauer, et al.

Humans settled the Caribbean about 6,000 years ago, and ceramic use and intensified agriculture mark a shift from the Archaic to the Ceramic Age at around 2,500 years ago1,2,3. Here we report genome-wide data from 174 ancient individuals from The Bahamas, Haiti and the Dominican Republic (collectively, Hispaniola), Puerto Rico, Curaçao and Venezuela, which we co-analysed with 89 previously published ancient individuals. Stone-tool-using Caribbean people, who first entered the Caribbean during the Archaic Age, derive from a deeply divergent population that is closest to Central and northern South American individuals; contrary to previous work4, we find no support for ancestry contributed by a population related to North American individuals. Archaic-related lineages were >98% replaced by a genetically homogeneous ceramic-using population related to speakers of languages in the Arawak family from northeast South America; these people moved through the Lesser Antilles and into the Greater Antilles at least 1,700 years ago, introducing ancestry that is still present. Ancient Caribbean people avoided close kin unions despite limited mate pools that reflect small effective population sizes, which we estimate to be a minimum of 500–1,500 and a maximum of 1,530–8,150 individuals on the combined islands of Puerto Rico and Hispaniola in the dozens of generations before the individuals who we analysed lived. Census sizes are unlikely to be more than tenfold larger than effective population sizes, so previous pan-Caribbean estimates of hundreds of thousands of people are too large5,6. Confirming a small and interconnected Ceramic Age populatio7, we detect 19 pairs of cross-island cousins, close relatives buried around 75 km apart in Hispaniola and low genetic differentiation across islands. Genetic continuity across transitions in pottery styles reveals that cultural changes during the Ceramic Age were not driven by migration of genetically differentiated groups from the mainland, but instead reflected interactions within an interconnected Caribbean world1,8.

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The African Genome Variation Project shapes medical genetics in Africa

Posted in Africa, Articles, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Media Archive on 2014-12-11 02:16Z by Steven

The African Genome Variation Project shapes medical genetics in Africa

Nature: International Weekly Journal of Science
Published online: 2014-12-03
15 pages
DOI: 10.1038/nature13997

Deepti Gurdasani
Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute
Genome Campus
Hinxton, Cambridge, United Kingdom

et. al.

Given the importance of Africa to studies of human origins and disease susceptibility, detailed characterization of African genetic diversity is needed. The African Genome Variation Project provides a resource with which to design, implement and interpret genomic studies in sub-Saharan Africa and worldwide. The African Genome Variation Project represents dense genotypes from 1,481 individuals and whole-genome sequences from 320 individuals across sub-Saharan Africa. Using this resource, we find novel evidence of complex, regionally distinct hunter-gatherer and Eurasian admixture across sub-Saharan Africa. We identify new loci under selection, including loci related to malaria susceptibility and hypertension. We show that modern imputation panels (sets of reference genotypes from which unobserved or missing genotypes in study sets can be inferred) can identify association signals at highly differentiated loci across populations in sub-Saharan Africa. Using whole-genome sequencing, we demonstrate further improvements in imputation accuracy, strengthening the case for large-scale sequencing efforts of diverse African haplotypes. Finally, we present an efficient genotype array design capturing common genetic variation in Africa.

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Leonard Darwin Scholarship of the Eugenics Society

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, New Media on 2011-11-02 03:58Z by Steven

Leonard Darwin Scholarship of the Eugenics Society

Nature
Volume 138, Number 3496 (1936-11-31)
page 756
DOI: 10.1038/138756a0

The Eugenics Society has established a second Leonard Darwin scholarship, which is to be devoted to the investigation of racial crossing. The first holder is J. C. Trevor, a graduate of Oxford in anthropology, who has spent the last two years studying mixtures of negro and white stocks in the United States, with the aid of a Commonwealth fellowship. He has collected ethnological material in the Virgin Islands and in East Africa, and with Dr. Dudley Buxton has made an investigation of English medieval skulls. He has also a collection of biometric material on West African and American negro crania. Mr. Trevor will devote a year to a survey of the literature on the subject of inter-racial crossing

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