Traces of Taino

Reconstruction of a Taino village.

When I visited Puerto Rico for the first time several years ago, I was struck by the emphasis on ancient Taino culture, especially words, that I hadn't seen elsewhere in the Caribbean. The Taino people were thought to be extinct, yet many islanders have long insisted on a genealogical connection (correlating with a cultural one). aDNA extracted from the recent discovery of a Taino woman's tooth (found in a cave on Eleuthera in the Bahamas) proves that Taino do still exist. When Hannes Schroeder "compared the genomes of modern Puerto Ricans to the ancient Taino woman’s genome, he concluded that they descend in part from an indigenous population closely related to hers."

The full article in Ars Technica is a really interesting look at where some island populations come from, and where they have gone.

And here's another version, from Science.

-Courtney