A team of international scientists, including a researcher of the University of Coimbramanaged to extract DNA from a 10,000-year-old skeleton known as Luzio, it was announced on Monday.
The results show that Luzio “is an ancestor of present-day Native American populations and that, therefore, the assumption that the first Brazilians belonged to a different population was incorrect,” stressed the University of Coimbra in a statement.
“The study includes the largest dataset of ancient genomes in Brazil to demonstrate that coastal communities of ancient Amerindian times (sambaquis) do not represent a genetically homogeneous population,” stressed researcher Cláudia Cunha, from the Center for Research in Anthropology and health (CIAS ) of the University of Coimbra.
The scientist underlined that “this is the first genetic study covering such a vast region and this number of individuals for the country”, having through the genetic sequencing of ancient DNA “produced data from 34 individuals ten thousand years of age from the regions of the Atlantic coast, Lagoa Santa, lower Amazonia and northeastern Brazil”.
the sambaquis
The release states that the mounds “are vertical constructions made of shells, established about eight thousand years ago for more than three thousand kilometers on the east coast of South America”.
‘According to the archaeological record, the shell makers shared some cultural similarities. However, contrary to what was expected, these groups of people showed significant genetic differences, possibly due to regional contacts with inland groups,’ the study concluded.
Tiago Ferraz, first author of the study and a specialist at the Museum of Archeology and Ethnology of the University of São Paulo (Brazil), pointed out, in the press release, that those “cultural relics known as sambaquis were built over seven thousand years, consisting mainly of shells, sediments and other daily wastes”.
“The shell mounds were used by ancient indigenous peoples as dwellings, cemeteries and territorial demarcation, being among the most fascinating archaeological phenomena of pre-colonial South America,” he added. Tiago Ferraz.
Study managers Genomic history of coastal societies of eastern South America which also includes researchers from the University of Tübingen (Germany), ensure that “the extraction of DNA from Luzio’s skeleton was a central piece that was missing to reveal the origins of the first Americans”.
“The results clearly show that there was no diverse human population in America in the past, as was believed for decades,” they said.
With this study, published this Monday in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution the researchers concluded that “early hunter-gatherers of the Holocene [a época geológica em que os seres humanos se encontram há cerca de 12 mil anos] are genetically distinct from each other and from later populations of eastern South America”, so “there were no direct relationships to later coastal groups”.
The statement added that “the team’s analyzes also indicate that contemporary groups of sambaquis from the southeastern coast of Brazil, on the one hand, and the southern coast of Brazil, on the other, were genetically heterogeneous.”
The study further concludes that “both regions showed different demographic trajectories, perhaps due to the low mobility of coastal groups”, in contrast to the “cultural similarities described in the archaeological record”.