Tooth shows first natives have links to living Caribbeans
NewsPosted by: Dental Design 20th February 2018
As reported in Express, the thousand-year-old tooth, discovered by researchers, can be traced back to the first natives that met Columbus in the New World. This amazing find also provides evidence that there are descendants of said naties living in the Caribbean.
Researches found the woman’s tooth in a cave on the island of Eleuthera in the Bahamas to sequence the first complete ancient human genome from the Caribbean.
The woman lived sometime in between the 8th and 10th Centuries, at least 500 years before Columbus made landfall in the Bahamas.
The Express notes that researchers have said the results provide “unprecedented” insights into the genetic makeup of the Taino – commonly used to describe the indigenous people of the region.
There had been much research based on modern DNA that suggested that there was a link of continuity between the indigenous people and the Caribbean contemporary communities today. The new finding – in the form of the tooth -prove this to be true, with indigenous ancestry surviving to the present day.
The researchers found that contemporary Puerto Ricans has the closest link to the ancient Taino than any other group but further research is likely to be prove that this isn’t exclusive to Puerto Ricans and spreads across other Caribbean communities.
The discovery of the tooth, documented in the journal ‘Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences’ is to be of great significance to Caribbeans, who have claimed their heritage but historical narratives had branded Taino ‘extinct’.
Professor Eske Willerslev, of St John’s College, Cambridge University, and Copenhagen University, told Express: “It has always been clear that people in the Caribbean have Native American ancestry, but because the region has such a complex history of migration, it was difficult to prove whether this was specifically indigenous to the Caribbean, until now.”
