Video: Rick Groleau
About 6,000 years ago, at the start of the Archaic Age, humans first settled in the islands of the Caribbean. Three to four thousand years later, stone tools gave way to clay pottery and the Ceramic Age began. Another two millennia passed before Europeans sailed across the Atlantic and made first contact.
Those who study and those who live in the region have long wondered: Where did these stone tool-using and clay-crafting populations come from? Were they related to each other? How many people lived in the Caribbean when the Spanish first arrived? How much, if any, ancestry can today s Caribbean populations trace back to these precontact Indigenous groups?
Nature study that combines decades of archaeological work with advancements in genetic technology.
An international team led by Harvard Medical School’s David Reich analyzed the genomes of 263 individuals in the largest study of ancient human DNA in the Americas to date. The genetics trace two major migratory waves in the Caribbean by two distinct groups, thousands of years apart, revealing an archipelago settled by highly mobile people, with distant relatives often living on different islands.
Reich’s lab also developed a new genetic technique for estimating past population size, showing the number of people living in the Caribbean when Europeans arrived was far smaller than previously thought – likely in the tens of thousands, rather than the million or more reported by Columbus and his successors.