Researchers have learned a lot about how people settled the Americas by using genetic data. Columbia is part of the land bridge that links North and South America, making it crucial to our understanding of how people moved into the Americas. The first people entered South America here from the north, and then spread out into different areas.
Scientists have now found genetic evidence of early settlers of the high plains, or Altiplano, near Bogotá, Colombia. This population, which seems to have existed around 6,000 years ago, has not been described before this report, which was published in Science Advances. The work also revealed that this population essentially disappeared around 2,000 years ago, and a second migration wave from Central America replaced them.
"These are the first ancient human genomes from Colombia ever to be published," noted senior study author Professor Cosimo Posth of the University of Tübingen.
In this study, the investigators assessed genetic material from the bones and teeth of 21 individuals that were found at five archaeological sites on the Colombian Altiplano. The remains are from different time periods, which are thought to span about 6,000 years until shortly before Spaniards arrived and began colonizing the area.
The oldest of the remains was found at a site north of Bogotá at the Checua excavation, which is about 3,000 meters above sea level. The individuals found here were part of a small hunter-gatherer group, and part of the earliest population to move into and across South America.
But this population has no genetic link to individuals who lived in the same area about 2,000 years ago.
"We couldn't find descendants of these early hunter-gatherers of the Colombian high plains; the genes were not passed on. That means in the area around Bogotá there was a complete exchange of the population," said first study author Kim-Louise Krettek, of the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Paleoenvironment.
In South America, it is particularly "unusual" for the "genetic traces of the original population to disappear completely, said study co-author Andrea Casas-Vargas, of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. There has typically been significant genetic continuity in South America's Andean and southern cone populations.
"And it was that way as well in the populations which followed the hunter-gatherers in the Bogotá Altiplano until the arrival of European conquerors about 500 years ago, although in this region there was massive cultural change with the development of the Muisca culture," Casas-Vargas added.
Genetic information may tell us about human migration, but it does not reveal anything about human culture.
"The genetic disposition must not be viewed as equal to cultural identity," said Posth. The team also connected with local groups who are descended from the Muisca culture in the high plains. "As scientists addressing questions relevant to the Indigenous communities in Colombia, we respect and value the wealth of community-based knowledge."
Sources: Universitaet Tübingen, Science Advances
