Subject
[SHS.ANTHRO-BIO]Humanities and Social Sciences/Biological anthropology

Domains
Archéologie, Anthropologie, Biologie, Histoire, Sciences Sociales, Sciences humaines

Description

International audience The appearance of people associated with the Lapita culture in the South Pacific around 3,000 years ago marked the beginning of the last major human dispersal to unpopulated lands. However, the relationship of these pioneers to the long-established Papuan people of the New Guinea region is unclear. Here we present genome-wide ancient DNA data from three individuals from Vanuatu (about 3,100-2,700 years before present) and one from Tonga (about 2,700-2,300 years before present), and analyse them with data from 778 present-day East Asians and Oceanians. Today, indigenous people of the South Pacific harbour a mixture of ancestry from Papuans and a population of East Asian origin that no longer exists in unmixed form, but is a match to the ancient individuals. Most analyses have interpreted the minimum of twenty-five per cent Papuan ancestry in the region today as evidence that the first humans to reach Remote Oceania, including Polynesia, were derived from population mixtures near New Guinea, before their further expansion into Remote Oceania. However, our finding that the ancient individuals had little to no Papuan ancestry implies that later human population movements spread Papuan ancestry through the South Pacific after the first peopling of the islands.

Keywords

Language
English (en-GB)

Creators
Skoglund, Pontus, Posth, Cosimo, Sirak, Kendra, Spriggs, Matthew, Valentin, Frédérique, Bedford, Stuart, Clark, Geoffrey, Reepmeyer, Christian, Petchey, Fiona, Fernandes, Daniel, Fu, Qiaomei, Harney, Eadaoin, Lipson, Mark, Mallick, Swapan, Novak, Mario, Rohland, Nadin, Stewardson, Kristin, Abdullah, Syafiq, Cox, Murray, Friedlaender, Françoise, Friedlaender, Jonathan, Kivisild, Toomas, Koki, George, Kusuma, Pradiptajati, Merriwether, D Andrew, Ricaut, François-X, Wee, Joseph, Patterson, Nick, Krause, Johannes, Pinhasi, Ron, Reich, David

Contributors
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (MPI-SHH) ; Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, University College Dublin [Dublin] (UCD), Australian National University (ANU), Archéologies et Sciences de l'Antiquité (ArScAn) ; Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (UP1)-Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis (UP8)-Université Paris Nanterre (UPN)-Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication (MCC)-Institut national de recherches archéologiques préventives (Inrap)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), James Cook University (JCU), Radiocarbon Dating Laboratory, University of Waikato ; University of Waikato [Hamilton], School of Archaeology [Dublin] ; University College Dublin [Dublin] (UCD), Department of Genetics [Boston] ; Harvard Medical School [Boston] (HMS), Harvard School of Public Health, Department of Evolutianory Genetics ; Max-Planck-Institut, Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies University of Cambridge ; University of Cambridge [UK] (CAM), Anthropologie Moléculaire et Imagerie de Synthèse (AMIS) ; Université Toulouse III - Paul Sabatier (UT3) ; Université Fédérale Toulouse Midi-Pyrénées-Université Fédérale Toulouse Midi-Pyrénées-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Department of Archaeogenetics [Jena] (DAG) ; Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (MPI-SHH) ; Max-Planck-Gesellschaft-Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, School of Archaeology ; University College Dublin [Dublin] (UCD), Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard (BROAD INSTITUTE) ; Harvard Medical School [Boston] (HMS)-Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)-Massachusetts General Hospital [Boston]

Sources
ISSN: 0028-0836, EISSN: 1476-4687, Nature, https://hal.science/hal-02112761, Nature, 2016, 538 (7626), pp.510-513. ⟨10.1038/nature19844⟩

Relation
info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/doi/10.1038/nature19844
info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/pmid/27698418

Coverage
Vanuatu

Name of newspaper