Every schoolboy knows that the “history” of the Caribbean region of North America began in 1492, but the authors of a new paper in PLoS GENETICS add some twists to the story.
The researchers found that segments of Amerindian ancestry are very short and of relatively even size. The shortness of the segments of Amerindian DNA means that there must have been many generations of shuffling to break apart the long sequences.
The uniform size of the segments means that they were mixed into the ancestral gene pool at the same time, approximately 1600 AD. After this the mixing ended. There was demographic extinction, just as the historians record. But that extinction was not genetically total.
Read the full, original story here: How genetics are rewriting the history of the Caribbean
