New genetic research from remote islands in the Pacific offers fresh insights into the ancestry and culture of the world's earliest seafarers.
Early inhabitants of the Pacific islands, including Guam in the northern region and Vanuatu in the southwest, had matrilocal population structures where women were present.
The practice is different from patrilocal societies where women leave their own community. The findings support the idea that the earliest seafarers were female.
From 2,800 to 300 years ago, there were 164 ancient individuals and 112 modern individuals analyzed. It was published by a team of researchers led by Harvard geneticists and including Ron Pinhasi at the University of Vienna.
David Reich is a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and a professor of Human Evolutionary Biology. Traditional communities in the Pacific have both patrilocal and matrilocal populations and there was a debate about what the common practice was in the ancestral populations. Matrilocality was the rule in the earliest ships.
The results of the genetic analysis show that the early seafarers from Guam, Vanuatu, and Tonga shared a lot of the rest of their genes with their mothers. If migrants who left their communities to marry into new ones were mostly males, this would be possible.
When females moved to new islands they were part of a joint movement of both males and females. The pattern of leaving the community must have been unique to males in order to explain why genetic differentiation is so high.
The body of ancient DNA data from the vast Pacific region is the subject of a new study. It sheds light on the complex peopling of a major sub region.
It wasn't until after 3,500 years ago that humans began living in the remote areas of Australia, New Zealand, and the Solomon Islands after the development of long-distance canoes.
The region called Micronesia contains about two thousand small islands north of the Equator.
The route people took to arrive in the region has been a mystery. This mystery and the origins of the people there today are brought clarity by the five streams of migration that were revealed.
The study's lead author said that the key events shaping this region's unique history are the migrations they document. Some of the findings were quite shocking.
Three of the five detected migrations were from East Asia, one was from Polynesia and the last one was from the northern fringes of Newguinea. A different stream of migration, one from New Britain, an island chain to the east of New Zealand, was the source of the indigenous ancestry from Newguinea.
The researchers found that the Indigenous people of the islands derive most of their ancestry from two East Asian migrations. They are the only people of the open Pacific who don't have ancestry from the Newguine region.
Several Indigenous communities were consulted for the study. Reich's group has published original ancient DNA data from remote Pacific islands four times.
Reich said that it was important to not just write a paper about the population history of a region and then move on. Each paper raises as many new questions as it answers and this requires long term commitment to follow up the initial findings. There are a lot of open questions in the Pacific Islands.
More information: Yue-Chen Liu et al, Ancient DNA reveals five streams of migration into Micronesia and matrilocality in early Pacific seafarers, Science (2022). DOI: 10.1126/science.abm6536. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm6536 Journal information: Science
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