Friday, July 1, 2022

A Detailed Prehistory Of Micronesia


A new study provides a maximally detailed five wave model of the prehistoric human settlement of Micronesia, relying on ancient and modern DNA, linguistics and archaeology.

Notably, it determines that the Mariana Islands lack Papuan ancestry, and that Micronesians were strictly matrilocal.
Micronesia began to be peopled earlier than other parts of Remote Oceania, but the origins of its inhabitants remain unclear. We generated genome-wide data from 164 ancient and 112 modern individuals. 
Analysis reveals five migratory streams into Micronesia. Three are East Asian related, one is Polynesian, and a fifth is a Papuan source related to mainland New Guineans that is different from the New Britain–related Papuan source for southwest Pacific populations but is similarly derived from male migrants ~2500 to 2000 years ago. 
People of the Mariana Archipelago may derive all of their precolonial ancestry from East Asian sources, making them the only Remote Oceanians without Papuan ancestry. 
Female-inherited mitochondrial DNA was highly differentiated across early Remote Oceanian communities but homogeneous within, implying matrilocal practices whereby women almost never raised their children in communities different from the ones in which they grew up.

2 comments:

Guy said...

Hum... due to my interest in WW2 in the Pacific I thought I had a good handle on the island names. Jeez, I still had to look half of them up! Anyway the PCA is very informative and summarizes much of the article, along with the map you posted. Cheers,
Guy

andrew said...

I thought about posting the PCA, but the print is hard to read at the size it appears in a blog post.