Ancient DNA Proves The Pacific Islanders Are Not Who We Thought Brett Goldstein [clR4RIM1idb]

In 2008 a fragment of finger bone the size of a shirt button came out of Denisova Cave in southern Siberia. It belonged to no human population anyone had ever described. And the living people who carry the most DNA from whoever it was are eight thousand kilometres away, in the islands of the western Pacific.

Between four and six percent of the Melanesian genome traces to Denisovans, kinsky spurs an archaic human population known from a fingertip, a few teeth and one jaw. No skull. No skeleton. Almost everything we know about them was reconstructed from the genomes of people alive today in Papua New Guinea, Bougainville and the Philippines.

The anchor study is Reich, Green and Kircher et al., published in Nature in December 2010. This episode follows the evidence forward from there to the three separate Denisovan populations identified in 2019, and to the Ayta Magbukon of Bataan, who carry more Denisovan ancestry than anyone else on Earth, for a reason that dismantles the idea of ranking populations altogether.

Discover what ancient DNA actually shows about Pacific Islander ancestry, and why archaic DNA is a record of contact rather than of rank.

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SOURCES CITED

Reich, D., Green, R.E., Kircher, M. et al. (2010). Nature 468(7327):1053-1060.

Jacobs, G.S. et al. (2019). Cell 177(4):1010-1021.

Larena, M. et al. (2021). Current Biology 31(19):4219-4230.

Chen, F., Zhang, D. et al. (2019). Nature Denisovan mandible, Tibetan Plateau.

Slon, V. et al. (2018). Nature Denisova 11.

Huerta-Sanchez, E. et al. (2014). Nature EPAS1 altitude adaptation. wheel of fortune car prize