Archaeologist and Curator/Lab Director at AEX Bahamas Maritime Museum Dr Michael Pateman (left) excavates Lucayan skeletal remains on Long Island, as Long Island resident Anthony Maillis assists. (PHOTO: DR WILLIAM KEEGAN)
NASSAU, BAHAMAS On December 23, a team of international researchers including Bahamian co-authors Dr Michael Pateman and Dr Tanya Simms published a new study revealing details on how the islands of the Caribbean were originally settled.
Archaeologist and Curator/Lab Director at AEX Bahamas Maritime Museum Dr Michael Pateman.
Population Geneticist and Assistant Professor at the University of The Bahamas‘ Department of Chemistry and Life Sciences Dr Tanya Simms.
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?