{"id":345448,"date":"2022-07-06T10:30:44","date_gmt":"2022-07-06T14:30:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/?p=345448"},"modified":"2023-11-08T19:51:18","modified_gmt":"2023-11-09T00:51:18","slug":"research-on-genomic-history-of-remote-pacific-islands-yields-surprising-findings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/story\/2022\/07\/research-on-genomic-history-of-remote-pacific-islands-yields-surprising-findings\/","title":{"rendered":"Tracing history of early seafarers through genes"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\t\n\t
\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\tScience & Tech\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\n\t\t

\n\t\tTracing history of early seafarers through genes\t<\/h1>\n\n\t\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t
\"A

Guam (pictured) was one of the Pacific islands that scientists believe maintained a matrilocal population structure some 2,500 to 3,500 years ago.<\/p>

David Burdick NOAA<\/p><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\t

\n\t\t
\n\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t

\n\t\tJuan Siliezar\t<\/p>\n\t\t\t

\n\t\t\tHarvard Staff Writer\t\t<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/address>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t\t

\n\t\t\tNew research on remote Pacific islands yields surprising findings on ancestry, culture\t\t<\/h2>\n\t\t\n<\/header>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\t\t

New genetic research from remote islands in the Pacific offers fresh insights into the ancestry and culture of the world\u2019s earliest transoceanic seafarers, including family structure, social customs, and the ancestral populations of the people living there today.<\/p>\n

The work, described<\/a> in the journal Science, reveals five previously undocumented migrations into a subregion of this area and suggests that about 2,500 to 3,500 years ago early inhabitants of these Pacific islands \u2014 including Guam in the northern region and Vanuatu in the southwest \u2014 had matrilocal population structures, ones in which women almost typically remained in their communities after marriage while men more often moved out of theirs to join them.<\/p>\n

The practice is opposite of patrilocal societies, in which women typically relocate. These findings support the idea that these early seafarers were from cultures organized through female lineages.<\/p>\n

The results come from a genome-wide analysis on 164 individuals from 2,800 to 300 years ago, as well 112 modern individuals. It was published by a team of researchers co-led by Harvard geneticists\u00a0David Reich<\/a> and Yue-Chen Liu, Ron Pinhasi at the University of Vienna, and Rosalind Hunter-Anderson, an independent researcher working in Albuquerque, New Mexico.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s an unexpected gift to be able to learn about cultural patterns from genetic data,\u201d said Reich, a professor in the\u00a0Department of Human Evolutionary Biology<\/a>\u00a0and a professor of genetics at\u00a0Harvard Medical School<\/a>. \u201cToday, traditional communities in the Pacific have both patrilocal and matrilocal population structures, and there was a debate about what the common practice was in the ancestral populations. These results suggest that in the earliest seafarers, matrilocality was the rule.\u201d<\/p>\n

The genetic analysis compared mitochondrial DNA sequences \u2014 which are inherited only from biological mothers \u2014 of the first seafarers from Guam to those of the first seafarers from the southwest islands of Vanuatu, and Tonga who lived 2,500-3,000 years ago. It revealed that the two lineages of the first Remote Oceanians derived from two distinctly different maternal lineages but that kind of stark differentiation didn\u2019t exist in terms of the rest of their DNA.<\/p>\n\r\n\t\n\n\t

\"Map

Map of migration routes.\t\t\t<\/p>

Credit: David Reich, Yue-Chen Liu, and Rosalind Hunter-Anderson<\/p><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\t\n\t\r\n\n

Researchers ran these results through mathematical simulations, which showed\u00a0that this kind of genetic drift in the two groups could not have happened randomly and lead them to the conclusion that the cause was most likely the result of women not moving around to different islands as much as men.<\/p>\n

\u201cFemales certainly moved to new islands, but when they did so they were part of joint movements of both females and males\u201d said Reich. \u201cThis pattern of leaving the community must have been nearly unique to males in order to explain why genetic differentiation is so much higher in mitochondrial DNA than in the rest of the genome.\u201d<\/p>\n

The new study from an interdisciplinary team of geneticists and archaeologists quintuples the body of ancient DNA data from the vast Pacific region called Remote Oceania, the last habitable place on earth to be peopled. It also provides surprising insights into the extraordinarily complex peopling of one of Remote Oceania\u2019s major subregions.<\/p>\n

Humans arrived and spread through Australia, New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, and the Solomon Islands beginning 50,000 years ago, but it wasn\u2019t until after 3,500 years ago that they began living in Remote Oceania for the first time after developing the technology to cross open water in long-distance canoes.<\/p>\n

This expansion included the region called Micronesia \u2014 about 2,000 small islands north of the equator, including Guam, the Marshall Islands, the Caroline Islands, Palau, and the Northern Mariana Islands.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s long been a mystery what routes people took to arrive in the region. The discovery that there were five streams of migration into Micronesia helps bring clarity to this mystery and the origins of the people there today.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese migrations we document with ancient DNA are the key events shaping this region\u2019s unique history,\u201d said Liu, a postdoctoral fellow in Reich\u2019s lab and the study\u2019s lead author. \u201cSome of the findings were very surprising.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of the five migrations, three were from East Asia, one from Polynesia, and one involved Papuans from the northern fringes of mainland New Guinea. This represented a new wrinkle for researchers because a prior stream of migration to the southwest Pacific and Central Micronesia came not from the mainland but New Britain, an island chain to the east of it.<\/p>\n

The researchers also found that present-day Indigenous people of the Mariana Islands in Micronesia, including Guam and Saipan, derive nearly all their pre-European-contact ancestry from two of the East Asian-associated migrations the researchers detected. It makes them the \u201conly people of the open Pacific who lack ancestry from the New Guinea region,\u201d Liu said.<\/p>\n

The researchers consulted with several Indigenous communities in Micronesia for the study. This is the Reich group\u2019s fourth publication of original ancient DNA data from remote Pacific islands.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s important that when we do ancient DNA work, we don\u2019t just write a paper about the population history of a region and then move on,\u201d Reich said. \u201cEach paper raises as many new questions as it answers, and this requires long-term commitment to follow up the initial findings. In the Pacific islands there are so many open questions, so many surprises still to be discovered.\u201d<\/p>\n

Supporters for this study included the National Institutes of Health, the John Templeton Foundation, the Allen Discovery Center, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n<\/div>\n\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

New genetic research shows untold migration to remote Pacific islands was generally matrilocal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":105622744,"featured_media":345522,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"gz_ga_pageviews":125,"gz_ga_lastupdated":"2022-08-09 22:38","document_color_palette":"grey","author":"Juan Siliezar","affiliation":"Harvard Staff 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Gazette\",\"logo\":\"https:\\\/\\\/news.harvard.edu\\\/gazette\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2023\\\/12\\\/Harvard_Gazette_logo.svg\"},\"keywords\":[\"david reich\",\"dna\",\"fas\",\"genetics\",\"genome\",\"guam\",\"matrilocal\",\"pacific islands\",\"ron pinhasi\",\"rosalind hunter-anderson\",\"science\",\"yue-chen liu\"],\"dateCreated\":\"2022-07-06T14:30:44Z\",\"datePublished\":\"2022-07-06T14:30:44Z\",\"dateModified\":\"2023-11-09T00:51:18Z\"}<\/script>","tracker_url":"https:\/\/cdn.parsely.com\/keys\/news.harvard.edu\/p.js"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/A_palm-lined_jungle_coastline_on_Guam_1.jpg","has_blocks":true,"block_data":{"0":{"blockName":"harvard-gazette\/article-header","attrs":{"blockColorPalette":"","coloredHeading":"","creditText":"David Burdick NOAA","displayDetails":"","displayTitle":"","categoryId":1387,"mediaAlt":"A palm-lined jungle coastline on Guam.","mediaCaption":"Guam (pictured) was one of the Pacific islands that scientists believe maintained a matrilocal population structure some 2,500 to 3,500 years ago.","mediaId":345522,"mediaSize":"full","mediaType":"image","mediaUrl":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/A_palm-lined_jungle_coastline_on_Guam_1.jpg","poster":"","title":"Tracing history of early seafarers through genes","subheading":"New research on remote Pacific islands yields surprising findings on ancestry, culture","className":"is-style-fullscreen","mediaHeight":1406,"mediaWidth":2500,"backgroundFixed":false,"backgroundTone":"light","centeredImage":false,"coloredBackground":false,"displayOverlay":true,"fadeInText":false,"isAmbient":false,"mediaLength":"","mediaPosition":"","posterText":"","titleAbove":false,"useUncroppedImage":false,"lock":[],"metadata":[]},"innerBlocks":[],"innerHTML":"<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img alt=\"A palm-lined jungle coastline on Guam.\" height=\"1406\" loading=\"eager\" src=\"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/A_palm-lined_jungle_coastline_on_Guam_1.jpg\" width=\"2500\"\/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\"><p class=\"wp-element-caption--caption\">Guam (pictured) was one of the Pacific islands that scientists believe maintained a matrilocal population structure some 2,500 to 3,500 years ago.<\/p><p class=\"wp-element-caption--credit\">David Burdick NOAA<\/p><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","innerContent":["<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img alt=\"A palm-lined jungle coastline on Guam.\" height=\"1406\" loading=\"eager\" src=\"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/A_palm-lined_jungle_coastline_on_Guam_1.jpg\" width=\"2500\"\/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\"><p class=\"wp-element-caption--caption\">Guam (pictured) was one of the Pacific islands that scientists believe maintained a matrilocal population structure some 2,500 to 3,500 years ago.<\/p><p class=\"wp-element-caption--credit\">David Burdick NOAA<\/p><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n"],"rendered":"<header\n\tclass=\"wp-block-harvard-gazette-article-header alignfull article-header is-style-fullscreen has-overlay\"\n\tstyle=\" \"\n>\n\t\n\t<div class=\"article-header__content\">\n\t\t\t<a\n\t\t\tclass=\"article-header__category\"\n\t\t\thref=\"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/section\/science-technology\/\"\n\t\t>\n\t\t\tScience & Tech\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\n\t\t<h1 class=\"article-header__title wp-block-heading \">\n\t\tTracing history of early seafarers through genes\t<\/h1>\n\n\t\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img alt=\"A palm-lined jungle coastline on Guam.\" height=\"1406\" loading=\"eager\" src=\"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/A_palm-lined_jungle_coastline_on_Guam_1.jpg\" width=\"2500\"\/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\"><p class=\"wp-element-caption--caption\">Guam (pictured) was one of the Pacific islands that scientists believe maintained a matrilocal population structure some 2,500 to 3,500 years ago.<\/p><p class=\"wp-element-caption--credit\">David Burdick NOAA<\/p><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\t<div class=\"article-header__meta\">\n\t\t<div class=\"wp-block-post-author\">\n\t\t\t<address class=\"wp-block-post-author__content\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<p class=\"author wp-block-post-author__name\">\n\t\tJuan Siliezar\t<\/p>\n\t\t\t<p class=\"wp-block-post-author__byline\">\n\t\t\tHarvard Staff Writer\t\t<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/address>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t\t<time class=\"article-header__date\" datetime=\"2022-07-06\">\n\t\t\tJuly 6, 2022\t\t<\/time>\n\n\t\t<span class=\"article-header__reading-time\">\n\t\t\t5 min read\t\t<\/span>\n\t<\/div>\n\n\t\n\t\t\t<h2 class=\"article-header__subheading wp-block-heading\">\n\t\t\tNew research on remote Pacific islands yields surprising findings on ancestry, culture\t\t<\/h2>\n\t\t\n<\/header>\n"},"2":{"blockName":"core\/group","attrs":{"templateLock":false,"metadata":{"name":"Article content"},"align":"wide","layout":{"type":"constrained","justifyContent":"center"},"tagName":"div","lock":[],"className":"","style":[],"backgroundColor":"","textColor":"","gradient":"","fontSize":"","fontFamily":"","borderColor":"","ariaLabel":"","anchor":""},"innerBlocks":[{"blockName":"core\/freeform","attrs":{"content":"","lock":[],"metadata":[]},"innerBlocks":[],"innerHTML":"\n\t\t<p>New genetic research from remote islands in the Pacific offers fresh insights into the ancestry and culture of the world\u2019s earliest transoceanic seafarers, including family structure, social customs, and the ancestral populations of the people living there today.<\/p>\n<p>The work, <a href=\"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1126\/science.abm6536\">described<\/a> in the journal Science, reveals five previously undocumented migrations into a subregion of this area and suggests that about 2,500 to 3,500 years ago early inhabitants of these Pacific islands \u2014 including Guam in the northern region and Vanuatu in the southwest \u2014 had matrilocal population structures, ones in which women almost typically remained in their communities after marriage while men more often moved out of theirs to join them.<\/p>\n<p>The practice is opposite of patrilocal societies, in which women typically relocate. These findings support the idea that these early seafarers were from cultures organized through female lineages.<\/p>\n<p>The results come from a genome-wide analysis on 164 individuals from 2,800 to 300 years ago, as well 112 modern individuals. It was published by a team of researchers co-led by Harvard geneticists\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/heb.fas.harvard.edu\/people\/david-reich\">David Reich<\/a> and Yue-Chen Liu, Ron Pinhasi at the University of Vienna, and Rosalind Hunter-Anderson, an independent researcher working in Albuquerque, New Mexico.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s an unexpected gift to be able to learn about cultural patterns from genetic data,\u201d said Reich, a professor in the\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/heb.fas.harvard.edu\/\">Department of Human Evolutionary Biology<\/a>\u00a0and a professor of genetics at\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/hms.harvard.edu\/\">Harvard Medical School<\/a>. \u201cToday, traditional communities in the Pacific have both patrilocal and matrilocal population structures, and there was a debate about what the common practice was in the ancestral populations. These results suggest that in the earliest seafarers, matrilocality was the rule.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The genetic analysis compared mitochondrial DNA sequences \u2014 which are inherited only from biological mothers \u2014 of the first seafarers from Guam to those of the first seafarers from the southwest islands of Vanuatu, and Tonga who lived 2,500-3,000 years ago. It revealed that the two lineages of the first Remote Oceanians derived from two distinctly different maternal lineages but that kind of stark differentiation didn\u2019t exist in terms of the rest of their DNA.<\/p>\n","innerContent":["\n\t\t<p>New genetic research from remote islands in the Pacific offers fresh insights into the ancestry and culture of the world\u2019s earliest transoceanic seafarers, including family structure, social customs, and the ancestral populations of the people living there today.<\/p>\n<p>The work, <a href=\"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1126\/science.abm6536\">described<\/a> in the journal Science, reveals five previously undocumented migrations into a subregion of this area and suggests that about 2,500 to 3,500 years ago early inhabitants of these Pacific islands \u2014 including Guam in the northern region and Vanuatu in the southwest \u2014 had matrilocal population structures, ones in which women almost typically remained in their communities after marriage while men more often moved out of theirs to join them.<\/p>\n<p>The practice is opposite of patrilocal societies, in which women typically relocate. These findings support the idea that these early seafarers were from cultures organized through female lineages.<\/p>\n<p>The results come from a genome-wide analysis on 164 individuals from 2,800 to 300 years ago, as well 112 modern individuals. It was published by a team of researchers co-led by Harvard geneticists\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/heb.fas.harvard.edu\/people\/david-reich\">David Reich<\/a> and Yue-Chen Liu, Ron Pinhasi at the University of Vienna, and Rosalind Hunter-Anderson, an independent researcher working in Albuquerque, New Mexico.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s an unexpected gift to be able to learn about cultural patterns from genetic data,\u201d said Reich, a professor in the\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/heb.fas.harvard.edu\/\">Department of Human Evolutionary Biology<\/a>\u00a0and a professor of genetics at\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/hms.harvard.edu\/\">Harvard Medical School<\/a>. \u201cToday, traditional communities in the Pacific have both patrilocal and matrilocal population structures, and there was a debate about what the common practice was in the ancestral populations. These results suggest that in the earliest seafarers, matrilocality was the rule.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The genetic analysis compared mitochondrial DNA sequences \u2014 which are inherited only from biological mothers \u2014 of the first seafarers from Guam to those of the first seafarers from the southwest islands of Vanuatu, and Tonga who lived 2,500-3,000 years ago. It revealed that the two lineages of the first Remote Oceanians derived from two distinctly different maternal lineages but that kind of stark differentiation didn\u2019t exist in terms of the rest of their DNA.<\/p>\n"],"rendered":"\n\t\t<p>New genetic research from remote islands in the Pacific offers fresh insights into the ancestry and culture of the world\u2019s earliest transoceanic seafarers, including family structure, social customs, and the ancestral populations of the people living there today.<\/p>\n<p>The work, <a href=\"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1126\/science.abm6536\">described<\/a> in the journal Science, reveals five previously undocumented migrations into a subregion of this area and suggests that about 2,500 to 3,500 years ago early inhabitants of these Pacific islands \u2014 including Guam in the northern region and Vanuatu in the southwest \u2014 had matrilocal population structures, ones in which women almost typically remained in their communities after marriage while men more often moved out of theirs to join them.<\/p>\n<p>The practice is opposite of patrilocal societies, in which women typically relocate. These findings support the idea that these early seafarers were from cultures organized through female lineages.<\/p>\n<p>The results come from a genome-wide analysis on 164 individuals from 2,800 to 300 years ago, as well 112 modern individuals. It was published by a team of researchers co-led by Harvard geneticists\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/heb.fas.harvard.edu\/people\/david-reich\">David Reich<\/a> and Yue-Chen Liu, Ron Pinhasi at the University of Vienna, and Rosalind Hunter-Anderson, an independent researcher working in Albuquerque, New Mexico.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s an unexpected gift to be able to learn about cultural patterns from genetic data,\u201d said Reich, a professor in the\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/heb.fas.harvard.edu\/\">Department of Human Evolutionary Biology<\/a>\u00a0and a professor of genetics at\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/hms.harvard.edu\/\">Harvard Medical School<\/a>. \u201cToday, traditional communities in the Pacific have both patrilocal and matrilocal population structures, and there was a debate about what the common practice was in the ancestral populations. These results suggest that in the earliest seafarers, matrilocality was the rule.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The genetic analysis compared mitochondrial DNA sequences \u2014 which are inherited only from biological mothers \u2014 of the first seafarers from Guam to those of the first seafarers from the southwest islands of Vanuatu, and Tonga who lived 2,500-3,000 years ago. It revealed that the two lineages of the first Remote Oceanians derived from two distinctly different maternal lineages but that kind of stark differentiation didn\u2019t exist in terms of the rest of their DNA.<\/p>\n"},{"blockName":"core\/image","attrs":{"sizeSlug":"full","align":"wide","id":345451,"caption":"Map of migration routes. ","creditText":"Credit: David Reich, Yue-Chen Liu, and Rosalind Hunter-Anderson","blob":"","url":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/MigrationRoutes1762d.jpg","alt":"Map of migration routes.","lightbox":[],"title":"","href":"","rel":"","linkClass":"","width":"","height":"","aspectRatio":"","scale":"","linkDestination":"","linkTarget":"","lock":[],"metadata":[],"className":"","style":[],"borderColor":"","anchor":""},"innerBlocks":[],"innerHTML":"\n\n\t<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignwide size-full is-resized\"><img src=\"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/MigrationRoutes1762d.jpg\" alt=\"Map of migration routes.\" class=\"wp-image-345451\"><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Map of migration routes.\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\t","innerContent":["\n\n\t<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignwide size-full is-resized\"><img src=\"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/MigrationRoutes1762d.jpg\" alt=\"Map of migration routes.\" class=\"wp-image-345451\"><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Map of migration routes.\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\t"],"rendered":"\n\n\t<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignwide size-full is-resized\"><img src=\"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/MigrationRoutes1762d.jpg\" alt=\"Map of migration routes.\" class=\"wp-image-345451\"><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\"><p class=\"wp-element-caption--caption\">Map of migration routes.\t\t\t<\/p><p class=\"wp-element-caption--credit\">Credit: David Reich, Yue-Chen Liu, and Rosalind Hunter-Anderson<\/p><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\t"},{"blockName":"core\/freeform","attrs":{"content":"","lock":[],"metadata":[]},"innerBlocks":[],"innerHTML":"\n<p>Researchers ran these results through mathematical simulations, which showed\u00a0that this kind of genetic drift in the two groups could not have happened randomly and lead them to the conclusion that the cause was most likely the result of women not moving around to different islands as much as men.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cFemales certainly moved to new islands, but when they did so they were part of joint movements of both females and males\u201d said Reich. \u201cThis pattern of leaving the community must have been nearly unique to males in order to explain why genetic differentiation is so much higher in mitochondrial DNA than in the rest of the genome.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The new study from an interdisciplinary team of geneticists and archaeologists quintuples the body of ancient DNA data from the vast Pacific region called Remote Oceania, the last habitable place on earth to be peopled. It also provides surprising insights into the extraordinarily complex peopling of one of Remote Oceania\u2019s major subregions.<\/p>\n<p>Humans arrived and spread through Australia, New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, and the Solomon Islands beginning 50,000 years ago, but it wasn\u2019t until after 3,500 years ago that they began living in Remote Oceania for the first time after developing the technology to cross open water in long-distance canoes.<\/p>\n<p>This expansion included the region called Micronesia \u2014 about 2,000 small islands north of the equator, including Guam, the Marshall Islands, the Caroline Islands, Palau, and the Northern Mariana Islands.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s long been a mystery what routes people took to arrive in the region. The discovery that there were five streams of migration into Micronesia helps bring clarity to this mystery and the origins of the people there today.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThese migrations we document with ancient DNA are the key events shaping this region\u2019s unique history,\u201d said Liu, a postdoctoral fellow in Reich\u2019s lab and the study\u2019s lead author. \u201cSome of the findings were very surprising.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Of the five migrations, three were from East Asia, one from Polynesia, and one involved Papuans from the northern fringes of mainland New Guinea. This represented a new wrinkle for researchers because a prior stream of migration to the southwest Pacific and Central Micronesia came not from the mainland but New Britain, an island chain to the east of it.<\/p>\n<p>The researchers also found that present-day Indigenous people of the Mariana Islands in Micronesia, including Guam and Saipan, derive nearly all their pre-European-contact ancestry from two of the East Asian-associated migrations the researchers detected. It makes them the \u201conly people of the open Pacific who lack ancestry from the New Guinea region,\u201d Liu said.<\/p>\n<p>The researchers consulted with several Indigenous communities in Micronesia for the study. This is the Reich group\u2019s fourth publication of original ancient DNA data from remote Pacific islands.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s important that when we do ancient DNA work, we don\u2019t just write a paper about the population history of a region and then move on,\u201d Reich said. \u201cEach paper raises as many new questions as it answers, and this requires long-term commitment to follow up the initial findings. In the Pacific islands there are so many open questions, so many surprises still to be discovered.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><em>Supporters for this study included the National Institutes of Health, the John Templeton Foundation, the Allen Discovery Center, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.<\/em><\/p>\n","innerContent":["\n<p>Researchers ran these results through mathematical simulations, which showed\u00a0that this kind of genetic drift in the two groups could not have happened randomly and lead them to the conclusion that the cause was most likely the result of women not moving around to different islands as much as men.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cFemales certainly moved to new islands, but when they did so they were part of joint movements of both females and males\u201d said Reich. \u201cThis pattern of leaving the community must have been nearly unique to males in order to explain why genetic differentiation is so much higher in mitochondrial DNA than in the rest of the genome.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The new study from an interdisciplinary team of geneticists and archaeologists quintuples the body of ancient DNA data from the vast Pacific region called Remote Oceania, the last habitable place on earth to be peopled. It also provides surprising insights into the extraordinarily complex peopling of one of Remote Oceania\u2019s major subregions.<\/p>\n<p>Humans arrived and spread through Australia, New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, and the Solomon Islands beginning 50,000 years ago, but it wasn\u2019t until after 3,500 years ago that they began living in Remote Oceania for the first time after developing the technology to cross open water in long-distance canoes.<\/p>\n<p>This expansion included the region called Micronesia \u2014 about 2,000 small islands north of the equator, including Guam, the Marshall Islands, the Caroline Islands, Palau, and the Northern Mariana Islands.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s long been a mystery what routes people took to arrive in the region. The discovery that there were five streams of migration into Micronesia helps bring clarity to this mystery and the origins of the people there today.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThese migrations we document with ancient DNA are the key events shaping this region\u2019s unique history,\u201d said Liu, a postdoctoral fellow in Reich\u2019s lab and the study\u2019s lead author. \u201cSome of the findings were very surprising.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Of the five migrations, three were from East Asia, one from Polynesia, and one involved Papuans from the northern fringes of mainland New Guinea. This represented a new wrinkle for researchers because a prior stream of migration to the southwest Pacific and Central Micronesia came not from the mainland but New Britain, an island chain to the east of it.<\/p>\n<p>The researchers also found that present-day Indigenous people of the Mariana Islands in Micronesia, including Guam and Saipan, derive nearly all their pre-European-contact ancestry from two of the East Asian-associated migrations the researchers detected. It makes them the \u201conly people of the open Pacific who lack ancestry from the New Guinea region,\u201d Liu said.<\/p>\n<p>The researchers consulted with several Indigenous communities in Micronesia for the study. This is the Reich group\u2019s fourth publication of original ancient DNA data from remote Pacific islands.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s important that when we do ancient DNA work, we don\u2019t just write a paper about the population history of a region and then move on,\u201d Reich said. \u201cEach paper raises as many new questions as it answers, and this requires long-term commitment to follow up the initial findings. In the Pacific islands there are so many open questions, so many surprises still to be discovered.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><em>Supporters for this study included the National Institutes of Health, the John Templeton Foundation, the Allen Discovery Center, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.<\/em><\/p>\n"],"rendered":"\n<p>Researchers ran these results through mathematical simulations, which showed\u00a0that this kind of genetic drift in the two groups could not have happened randomly and lead them to the conclusion that the cause was most likely the result of women not moving around to different islands as much as men.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cFemales certainly moved to new islands, but when they did so they were part of joint movements of both females and males\u201d said Reich. \u201cThis pattern of leaving the community must have been nearly unique to males in order to explain why genetic differentiation is so much higher in mitochondrial DNA than in the rest of the genome.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The new study from an interdisciplinary team of geneticists and archaeologists quintuples the body of ancient DNA data from the vast Pacific region called Remote Oceania, the last habitable place on earth to be peopled. It also provides surprising insights into the extraordinarily complex peopling of one of Remote Oceania\u2019s major subregions.<\/p>\n<p>Humans arrived and spread through Australia, New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, and the Solomon Islands beginning 50,000 years ago, but it wasn\u2019t until after 3,500 years ago that they began living in Remote Oceania for the first time after developing the technology to cross open water in long-distance canoes.<\/p>\n<p>This expansion included the region called Micronesia \u2014 about 2,000 small islands north of the equator, including Guam, the Marshall Islands, the Caroline Islands, Palau, and the Northern Mariana Islands.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s long been a mystery what routes people took to arrive in the region. The discovery that there were five streams of migration into Micronesia helps bring clarity to this mystery and the origins of the people there today.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThese migrations we document with ancient DNA are the key events shaping this region\u2019s unique history,\u201d said Liu, a postdoctoral fellow in Reich\u2019s lab and the study\u2019s lead author. \u201cSome of the findings were very surprising.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Of the five migrations, three were from East Asia, one from Polynesia, and one involved Papuans from the northern fringes of mainland New Guinea. This represented a new wrinkle for researchers because a prior stream of migration to the southwest Pacific and Central Micronesia came not from the mainland but New Britain, an island chain to the east of it.<\/p>\n<p>The researchers also found that present-day Indigenous people of the Mariana Islands in Micronesia, including Guam and Saipan, derive nearly all their pre-European-contact ancestry from two of the East Asian-associated migrations the researchers detected. It makes them the \u201conly people of the open Pacific who lack ancestry from the New Guinea region,\u201d Liu said.<\/p>\n<p>The researchers consulted with several Indigenous communities in Micronesia for the study. This is the Reich group\u2019s fourth publication of original ancient DNA data from remote Pacific islands.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s important that when we do ancient DNA work, we don\u2019t just write a paper about the population history of a region and then move on,\u201d Reich said. \u201cEach paper raises as many new questions as it answers, and this requires long-term commitment to follow up the initial findings. In the Pacific islands there are so many open questions, so many surprises still to be discovered.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><em>Supporters for this study included the National Institutes of Health, the John Templeton Foundation, the Allen Discovery Center, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.<\/em><\/p>\n"}],"innerHTML":"\n<div class=\"wp-block-group alignwide\">\n\n\r\n\t\n\t\r\n\n\n<\/div>\n","innerContent":["\n<div class=\"wp-block-group alignwide\">\n\n","\r\n\t","\n\t\r\n","\n\n<\/div>\n"],"rendered":"\n<div class=\"wp-block-group alignwide has-global-padding is-content-justification-center is-layout-constrained wp-block-group-is-layout-constrained\">\n\n\n\t\t<p>New genetic research from remote islands in the Pacific offers fresh insights into the ancestry and culture of the world\u2019s earliest transoceanic seafarers, including family structure, social customs, and the ancestral populations of the people living there today.<\/p>\n<p>The work, <a href=\"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1126\/science.abm6536\">described<\/a> in the journal Science, reveals five previously undocumented migrations into a subregion of this area and suggests that about 2,500 to 3,500 years ago early inhabitants of these Pacific islands \u2014 including Guam in the northern region and Vanuatu in the southwest \u2014 had matrilocal population structures, ones in which women almost typically remained in their communities after marriage while men more often moved out of theirs to join them.<\/p>\n<p>The practice is opposite of patrilocal societies, in which women typically relocate. These findings support the idea that these early seafarers were from cultures organized through female lineages.<\/p>\n<p>The results come from a genome-wide analysis on 164 individuals from 2,800 to 300 years ago, as well 112 modern individuals. It was published by a team of researchers co-led by Harvard geneticists\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/heb.fas.harvard.edu\/people\/david-reich\">David Reich<\/a> and Yue-Chen Liu, Ron Pinhasi at the University of Vienna, and Rosalind Hunter-Anderson, an independent researcher working in Albuquerque, New Mexico.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s an unexpected gift to be able to learn about cultural patterns from genetic data,\u201d said Reich, a professor in the\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/heb.fas.harvard.edu\/\">Department of Human Evolutionary Biology<\/a>\u00a0and a professor of genetics at\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/hms.harvard.edu\/\">Harvard Medical School<\/a>. \u201cToday, traditional communities in the Pacific have both patrilocal and matrilocal population structures, and there was a debate about what the common practice was in the ancestral populations. These results suggest that in the earliest seafarers, matrilocality was the rule.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The genetic analysis compared mitochondrial DNA sequences \u2014 which are inherited only from biological mothers \u2014 of the first seafarers from Guam to those of the first seafarers from the southwest islands of Vanuatu, and Tonga who lived 2,500-3,000 years ago. It revealed that the two lineages of the first Remote Oceanians derived from two distinctly different maternal lineages but that kind of stark differentiation didn\u2019t exist in terms of the rest of their DNA.<\/p>\n\r\n\t\n\n\t<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignwide size-full is-resized\"><img src=\"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/MigrationRoutes1762d.jpg\" alt=\"Map of migration routes.\" class=\"wp-image-345451\"><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\"><p class=\"wp-element-caption--caption\">Map of migration routes.\t\t\t<\/p><p class=\"wp-element-caption--credit\">Credit: David Reich, Yue-Chen Liu, and Rosalind Hunter-Anderson<\/p><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\t\n\t\r\n\n<p>Researchers ran these results through mathematical simulations, which showed\u00a0that this kind of genetic drift in the two groups could not have happened randomly and lead them to the conclusion that the cause was most likely the result of women not moving around to different islands as much as men.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cFemales certainly moved to new islands, but when they did so they were part of joint movements of both females and males\u201d said Reich. \u201cThis pattern of leaving the community must have been nearly unique to males in order to explain why genetic differentiation is so much higher in mitochondrial DNA than in the rest of the genome.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The new study from an interdisciplinary team of geneticists and archaeologists quintuples the body of ancient DNA data from the vast Pacific region called Remote Oceania, the last habitable place on earth to be peopled. It also provides surprising insights into the extraordinarily complex peopling of one of Remote Oceania\u2019s major subregions.<\/p>\n<p>Humans arrived and spread through Australia, New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, and the Solomon Islands beginning 50,000 years ago, but it wasn\u2019t until after 3,500 years ago that they began living in Remote Oceania for the first time after developing the technology to cross open water in long-distance canoes.<\/p>\n<p>This expansion included the region called Micronesia \u2014 about 2,000 small islands north of the equator, including Guam, the Marshall Islands, the Caroline Islands, Palau, and the Northern Mariana Islands.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s long been a mystery what routes people took to arrive in the region. The discovery that there were five streams of migration into Micronesia helps bring clarity to this mystery and the origins of the people there today.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThese migrations we document with ancient DNA are the key events shaping this region\u2019s unique history,\u201d said Liu, a postdoctoral fellow in Reich\u2019s lab and the study\u2019s lead author. \u201cSome of the findings were very surprising.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Of the five migrations, three were from East Asia, one from Polynesia, and one involved Papuans from the northern fringes of mainland New Guinea. This represented a new wrinkle for researchers because a prior stream of migration to the southwest Pacific and Central Micronesia came not from the mainland but New Britain, an island chain to the east of it.<\/p>\n<p>The researchers also found that present-day Indigenous people of the Mariana Islands in Micronesia, including Guam and Saipan, derive nearly all their pre-European-contact ancestry from two of the East Asian-associated migrations the researchers detected. It makes them the \u201conly people of the open Pacific who lack ancestry from the New Guinea region,\u201d Liu said.<\/p>\n<p>The researchers consulted with several Indigenous communities in Micronesia for the study. This is the Reich group\u2019s fourth publication of original ancient DNA data from remote Pacific islands.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s important that when we do ancient DNA work, we don\u2019t just write a paper about the population history of a region and then move on,\u201d Reich said. \u201cEach paper raises as many new questions as it answers, and this requires long-term commitment to follow up the initial findings. In the Pacific islands there are so many open questions, so many surprises still to be discovered.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><em>Supporters for this study included the National Institutes of Health, the John Templeton Foundation, the Allen Discovery Center, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n<\/div>\n"}},"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":150837,"url":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/story\/2013\/12\/saving-tortoises-by-a-hair\/","url_meta":{"origin":345448,"position":0},"title":"Saving tortoises by a hair","author":"harvardgazette","date":"December 18, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Five species of giant, long-lived Galapagos tortoises are thought to have gone extinct, but recent DNA analysis shows that some may survive on other islands in the archipelago, according to work by Michael Russello, Harvard Hrdy Fellow in Conservation Biology.","rel":"","context":"In "Health"","block_context":{"text":"Health","link":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/section\/health\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/121613_russello_1612_605.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/121613_russello_1612_605.jpg?resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/121613_russello_1612_605.jpg?resize=525%2C300 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":110927,"url":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/story\/2012\/05\/taking-the-long-way-home\/","url_meta":{"origin":345448,"position":1},"title":"Taking the long way home","author":"harvardgazette","date":"May 23, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"A Harvard graduate student has shown that some Australian and Pacific Island daddy longlegs took an unusual path to their new homes: drifting from the Americas and then island-hopping to their new continental home in Australia.","rel":"","context":"In "Health"","block_context":{"text":"Health","link":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/section\/health\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/05\/amerbug_mt_605.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/05\/amerbug_mt_605.jpg?resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/05\/amerbug_mt_605.jpg?resize=525%2C300 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":834,"url":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/story\/2008\/09\/island-nation-president-plans-for-extinction\/","url_meta":{"origin":345448,"position":2},"title":"Island nation president plans for extinction","author":"harvardgazette","date":"September 25, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"The leader of the South Pacific island nation of Kiribati laid out an extraordinary plan Monday (Sept. 22) that would scatter his people through the nations of the world as rising sea levels submerge the islands they have called home for centuries.","rel":"","context":"In "Science & Tech"","block_context":{"text":"Science & Tech","link":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/section\/science-technology\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":98993,"url":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/story\/2011\/12\/a-possible-aid-for-navigators\/","url_meta":{"origin":345448,"position":3},"title":"A possible aid for navigators","author":"harvardgazette","date":"December 21, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"John Huth, the creator of the popular \u201cPrimitive Navigation\u201d course, spent most of last summer investigating a mysterious phenomenon called \u201cunderwater lightning,\u201d which some say can be used as a navigational tool.","rel":"","context":"In "Health"","block_context":{"text":"Health","link":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/section\/health\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/12\/101411_primitivenavigation_035_605.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/12\/101411_primitivenavigation_035_605.jpg?resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/12\/101411_primitivenavigation_035_605.jpg?resize=525%2C300 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":61083,"url":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/story\/2008\/09\/global-warming-threatens-his-nations-existence-a-president-warns\/","url_meta":{"origin":345448,"position":4},"title":"Global warming threatens his nation’s existence, a president warns","author":"harvardgazette","date":"September 30, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"During a talk at Harvard, the leader of the South Pacific island nation of Kiribati laid out an extraordinary plan that would scatter his people through the nations of the world as rising sea levels submerge the islands they have called home for centuries. President Anote Tong said the half-meter\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Science & Tech"","block_context":{"text":"Science & Tech","link":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/section\/science-technology\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":171780,"url":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/story\/2015\/06\/alone-with-evolution\/","url_meta":{"origin":345448,"position":5},"title":"Alone with evolution","author":"harvardgazette","date":"June 23, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"Efforts by Harvard faculty to understand island evolution form the centerpiece of a new exhibition at the Harvard Museum of Natural History.","rel":"","context":"In "Health"","block_context":{"text":"Health","link":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/section\/health\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/060115_islands_091_605_1.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/060115_islands_091_605_1.jpg?resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/060115_islands_091_605_1.jpg?resize=525%2C300 1.5x"},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345448","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/105622744"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=345448"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345448\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":345526,"href":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345448\/revisions\/345526"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/345522"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=345448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=345448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=345448"},{"taxonomy":"format","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/gazette-formats?post=345448"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=345448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}