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About 50,000 years ago, humans arrived from southeastern Asia until Australia, New Guineathe Bismarck Archipelago and the Solomon Islands. However, further east, there were two thousand more islands to be discovered: from what we now know as Guamgoing through the Marshall Islandsuntil Caroline Islands (the territory called Micronesia) it is included Polynesia. is the call distant oceania, and was not conquered by man until 3,500 years ago, when the shipping technology of a new people enabled longer sea voyages. However, it is still a mystery where these first sailors of humanity came from and the routes they followed to settle in the most remote islands of the Pacific.
Now the analysis of 164 ancient human genomes (between 2,800 and 300 years ago) extracted from the remains of five archaeological sites in Micronesia, as well as the 112 genomes of current individuals from the same area, have revealed that there were up to five migratory currents that formed a heterogeneous lineage. And not only that: that these pioneering navigators had a system matrilineal in which it was the men who went to sea to find a partner, leaving their families and establishing themselves in the community of their wives. The results have just been published in the journal ‘Science’.
“It is an unexpected gift to be able to learn about cultural patterns from genetic data,” he explains. David Rich, professor in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology and professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School. “Currently, in the traditional communities of the Pacific they have both patrilocal and matrilocal structures, and there has been a debate about what was the common practice in the ancestral populations. These results suggest that in early mariners matrilocality was the rule.’
The genetic analysis compared the differences between the first mariners of the islands of Guam, Vanuatu and Tonga, who lived between 2,500 and 3,000 years ago. The results revealed that their mitochondrial DNA sequences, the part that is received only through the mother, differed almost completely; however, they did share much more of the rest of the genetic information, which indicates that it was the men who left their communities to marry women from other places who were deeply rooted on each island. In other words, unlike what happened in many of the populations of Europe or Asia, where the woman left her family to settle in her husband’s house, here they were the ones who left home to go live with their wives. .
Still, the genetic traces also revealed that the women did migrate to other islands, but “when they did, it was a joint movement of the entire village,” says Reich. “This pattern of community abandonment must have been almost unique to males to explain why genetic differentiation is so much greater in mitochondrial DNA than in the rest of the genome.”
where did they come from
Ancient genes also hid more answers. They found up to five migrations that revealed the origin, hitherto unknown, of the first inhabitants of these islands. Specifically, three of the five currents came from East Asia, another from Polynesia and a third from the Papuan community, coming from the northern fringe of mainland New Guinea. However, the indigenous ancestry of New Guinea was a great surprise, since a different stream of this migration, originating from New Britain – a chain of islands to the east of New Guinea – was the source of the Papuan ancestry in the southwest of the Pacific and in Central Micronesia.
In addition, the genes revealed that the current indigenous peoples of the Mariana Islands (Micronesia), including Guam and Saipan, derive for the most part from two Asian migrations, making them the only people in the open Pacific who lack Papuan ancestry.
“It’s important that when we do ancient DNA work, we don’t just write a paper about the population history of a region and then move on,” Reich emphasizes. Each study raises as many new questions as it answers, and this requires a long-term commitment to follow up on initial findings. In the Pacific islands there are still many open questions yet to be clarified».
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