A team of international scientists, including a researcher from the University of Coimbramanaged to extract DNA from a 10,000-year-old skeleton known as Luzio, it was announced this Monday.
The results show that Lúcio “is an ancestor of today’s native American populations and that, therefore, the assumption that the first Brazilians belonged to a different population was wrong,” stressed the University of Coimbra in a statement.
“The study includes the largest dataset of ancient genomes in Brazil to demonstrate that the coastal communities of the ancient period of the Americas (sambaquis) do not represent a genetically homogeneous population,” highlighted researcher Cláudia Cunha, from the Center for Research in Anthropology and Health (CIAS). ) from the University of Coimbra.
The scientist emphasized that “this is the first genetic study that covers such a large area and this number of people for the country”, having through the genetic sequence of ancient DNA “produced data from 34 people ten thousand years old from the coastal areas of the Atlantic, Lagoa Santa, the Lower Amazon and Northeastern Brazil.’
the sambakis
The statement states that middens “are vertical structures of shells, established about eight thousand years ago over three thousand kilometers on the east coast of South America.”
“According to the archaeological record, the shell builders shared some cultural similarities. However, contrary to expectations, these human groups showed significant genetic differences, possibly due to regional contacts with groups from the interior,” the study concluded.
Tiago Ferraz, first author of the study and an expert at the Museum of Archeology and Ethnology of the University of São Paulo (Brazil), pointed out: in the announcement, that these “cultural relics known as sambaquis were built over seven thousand years, composed mainly of shells, sediments and other everyday waste.”
“Shell mounds were used by ancient indigenous peoples as dwellings, cemeteries and territorial demarcations, constituting one of the most fascinating archaeological phenomena of pre-colonial South America,” he added. Tiago Ferraz.
Those responsible for the study Genetic history of coastal societies from eastern South America which also includes researchers from the University of Tübingen (Germany), assert that “the extraction of DNA from Luzio’s skeleton was a central missing piece to uncover the origins of the first Americans.”
“The results obtained clearly show that a diverse human population did not exist in the Americas in the past, as was believed for decades,” they argued.
With this study, published this Monday in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution the researchers concluded that “early Holocene hunter-gatherers [a época geológica em que os seres humanos se encontram há cerca de 12 mil anos] they are genetically distinct from each other and from later populations in eastern South America’, so ‘there were no direct relationships with later coastal groups’.
The statement added that “the group’s analyzes also show that modern sambaquis groups from the southeastern coast of Brazil, on the one hand, and from the southern coast of Brazil, on the other, were genetically heterogeneous.”
The study also concludes that “both regions exhibited different demographic trajectories, possibly due to the low mobility of coastal groups,” in contrast to the “cultural similarities described in the archaeological record.”
The researchers stressed that more regional and micro-scale studies are needed to learn more about the genomic history of South America.