'Groundbreaking' ancient DNA research confirms Pueblo peoples' ties to famous Chaco Canyon site
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.
A "groundbreaking" DNA analysis of a small Pueblo tribe in New Mexico supports what their oral tradition has long described — that they're related to ancestral people who lived on their land, as well as to Indigenous people who lived a few hundreds miles away at Chaco Canyon.
The new research is the first DNA evidence that the federally recognized tribe, known as Picuris Pueblo, has ancestral ties to Chacoans buried at Chaco Culture National Historical Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a place many Southwest Indigenous peoples consider sacred.
"We've always said we have this deep connection to Chaco Canyon," study co-author Craig Quanchello, the lieutenant governor of Picuris Pueblo, said at a news conference on April 29. "It not only runs through our veins, but now through science."
Picuris Pueblo, where the tribe lives, is in the Sangre De Cristo Mountains of northern New Mexico, about 60 miles (100 kilometres) north of Santa Fe. It was historically one of the most populated pueblos, with over 3,000 tribal members around 1600. But in the decades following European contact in 1591, death, disease and religious persecution reduced the Picuris population significantly. Now, tribal membership is around 300 individuals.
Related: Ancient Indigenous lineage of Blackfoot Confederacy goes back 18,000 years to last ice age, DNA reveals
Oral histories from Picuris elders have long connected the tribe to Chaco Canyon, Picuris Pueblo Governor Wayne Yazza said at the news conference. But knowledge lost over centuries of violence has led to gaps in historical knowledge.
To learn more about their genetic heritage, Picuris Pueblo leadership contacted researchers in 2020.
In that study, whose results were published Wednesday (April 30) in the journal Nature, researchers analyzed ancient DNA from 16 individuals buried in Picuris Pueblo dated to between 500 and 700 years ago, as well as 13 genomes from currently enrolled members of Picuris Pueblo. They compared these genomes to 590 ancient and modern genomes from the Americas and Siberia, since the first Americans traveled across a land bridge connecting Siberia with Alaska during the last ice age at least 23,000 years ago.
Their results revealed that the modern Picuris are related to those who lived in the pueblo centuries ago. The analysis also indicated that the Picuris are related to Anzick-1, a child who lived 13,000 years ago in what is now Montana and was part of an Indigenous American group called the Clovis. But "part of their [the Picuris] ancestry is actually older than the ancestry that we find in the Clovis individual," study lead author Thomaz Pinotti, a geogeneticist at the University of Copenhagen, said at the news conference.
The study also found a genetic link between the Picuris and nine individuals buried centuries ago in Chaco Canyon's Pueblo Bonito between 800 and 1130. Those individuals were analyzed in a 2017 Nature Communications study that faced backlash from tribal nations and researchers for failing to consult with local tribes during the study's design.
"We were pretty twisted up about using these data, because we knew how controversial they were," study co-author Mike Adler, an associate professor of anthropology at Southern Methodist University, said at the news conference. "When we brought this up to the tribal council, it was a very simple response: 'That's not your call. That's our call. You should use these data, because it's an avenue to better our understanding of our own past.'"
RELATED STORIES
—The 1st Americans were not who we thought they were
—13 of the oldest archaeological sites in the Americas
—Did humans cross the Bering Strait after the land bridge disappeared?
Meradeth Snow, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Montana who wasn't involved in the study, told Live Science the new study is "groundbreaking in a lot of ways."
"The fact that this was really something that was initiated by the Picuris [people] — that is amazing and really interesting," she said. However, she emphasized that this type of partnership may not be of interest to other Indigenous peoples. Western scientists have a long history of taking Native American ancestral remains and conducting studies without permission from tribes.
"I understand that there's definitely going to be different tribes in that region that are not going to be for this [type of DNA analysis]. And that's totally understandable. There's certainly been plenty of abuse of DNA data."
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Axios
6 hours ago
- Axios
Alcohol-related liver disease deaths double in two decades
The U.S. death rate from alcohol-related liver disease roughly doubled over two decades and was exacerbated by the pandemic, with women, young adults and Indigenous people experiencing the sharpest rise, a study in JAMA Network Open found. Why it matters: The increase continued past the acute phase of the pandemic, suggesting lasting changes in alcohol consumption patterns when deaths from other liver diseases like hepatitis C were falling, researchers wrote. The patterns demonstrate the need for targeted prevention and treatment strategies, including enhanced screening and alcohol cessation programs. What they found: The study of 436,814 alcohol-associated liver disease deaths between 1999 and 2022 showed mortality rates surged an annual average of 9% from 2018 to 2022, when pandemic-related stressors such as financial insecurity and social isolation led to increased drinking. Overall, the death rate increased from 6.7 to 12.5 deaths per 100,000 population between 1999 and 2022. The annual percentage increase was higher among women (4.3%) than men (2.5%). It also rose about 4.2% among young people ages 25-44. Between the lines: American Indian and Alaska Native communities faced the highest death rates, rising from about 25 to nearly 47 per 100,000 over the study period.
Yahoo
11 hours ago
- Yahoo
World's first images of the sun's south pole spark 'a new era of solar science'
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Just this once, it's OK to stare at the sun — provided you're looking at the European Space Agency's (ESA) newly released, history-making images of the solar south pole. Taken near the sun on March 23 and revealed to Earthlings Wednesday (June 11), the new images from ESA's Solar Orbiter show a view of our star that no human or spacecraft has ever recorded before. While Earth and the other planets orbit relatively in line with the sun's equator on an invisible plane called the ecliptic, Solar Orbiter spent the last several months tilting its orbit to 17 degrees below the solar equator — bringing our star's enigmatic south pole into view for the first time ever. "Today we reveal humankind's first-ever views of the Sun's pole," Carole Mundell, ESA's director of science, said in a statement. "These new unique views from our Solar Orbiter mission are the beginning of a new era of solar science." The new images capture the solar pole in a broad swath of visible and ultraviolet wavelengths, using three of Solar Orbiter's 10 onboard instruments. The result is a colorful confetti of solar data, including an unprecedented look at the perplexing tangles of the sun's magnetic field as it prepares to flip, and the high-velocity movements of specific chemical elements as they ride plumes of plasma that make up the solar wind — the constant stream of charged particles that governs space weather throughout our solar system. These data will help improve our understanding of the solar wind, space weather and the sun's roughly 11-year activity cycle for years to come, according to ESA. But of particular interest right now, as the sun spits out flares in overdrive during its period of peak activity (called solar maximum), are the magnetic measurements taken with Solar Orbiter's Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager (PHI) instrument. Related: NASA spacecraft snaps eerie image of eclipsed sun with an extra moon overhead. What's going on? PHI's maps of the solar magnetic field highlight an intriguing paradox: While most magnets have a distinct north and south pole, the sun's south pole is roiling with both north and south polarity magnetic fields (shown as blue and red patches in the corresponding images). According to ESA, this mess of magnetism is a temporary phenomenon that hints that the sun's magnetic field is about to flip, as it does once every 11 years or so. This magnetic reversal signifies the end of the high-activity solar maximum and begins a transition toward the relative calm of the next solar minimum. When the next minimum begins, approximately five to six years from now, the sun's poles should show only one type of magnetic polarity apiece as our star takes a break from launching violent space weather tantrums. RELATED STORIES —A mysterious, 100-year solar cycle may have just restarted — and it could mean decades of dangerous space weather —NASA's Parker Solar Probe spots powerful magnetic explosion aimed at the sun's surface —Ancient superpowered solar storm that hit Earth 14,000 years ago is the 'biggest ever identified' Solar Orbiter will have several more chances to test these predictions over the coming years. With a little help from the gravitational pull of Venus, Solar Orbiter will continue tilting its orbit further from the solar equator, reaching a tilt of 24 degrees in December 2026 and a whopping 33 degrees in June 2029. These ever-more-angular vantage points will expose the solar poles in even greater detail, improving our knowledge of our home star with every flyby. "This is just the first step of Solar Orbiter's 'stairway to heaven'," Daniel Müller, ESA's Solar Orbiter project scientist, said in the statement. "These data will transform our understanding of the Sun's magnetic field, the solar wind, and solar activity."
Yahoo
11 hours ago
- Yahoo
Laws of physics are still broken: Attempt to explain away black holes' central singularity falls short, scientist says
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Reports of the singularity's demise may have been premature. Earlier this year, new research suggested a potential solution to one of the most troubling aspects of modern physics — that "singularities" seem to exist at the hearts of black holes. The idea of the singularity has existed since black holes first emerged from the solutions to Albert Einstein's magnum opus theory of gravity, general relativity, which was published in 1916. It represents the point at which mass becomes infinitely dense — so concentrated that the curvature of space-time (the four-dimensional unification of space and time) it creates becomes infinite also. This was and remains somewhat concerning, because it represents a breakdown of the laws of physics. Thanks to their central singularity, black holes don't obey the laws of physics — even general relativity, the theory that first described them. That's a paradox that just won't do for many physicists, who are working hard to eliminate it by busting the central singularity. One of them is Robie Hennigar, a researcher at Durham University in England. "The singularity is the most mysterious and problematic part of a black hole. It's where our concepts of space and time literally no longer make sense," Hennigar told back in March. "If black holes do not have singularities, then they are much more ordinary." In a study published in February, Hennigar and his colleagues used an effective theory that modified the Einstein field equations of general relativity so that gravity behaves differently when space-time is highly curved. This replaces the central singularity with a highly warped static region located at the core of the black hole. Unfortunately, this recipe of gravity just isn't to the taste of many scientists, including Polish theoretical physicist Nikodem Poplawski of the University of New Haven, who told that he has three main issues with the team's theory. "Firstly, the team assumes the existence of five dimensions, whereas the experiments and observations indicate that we live in a four-dimensional space-time," Poplawski said. While lots of other theories that could account for singularities also rely on extra dimensions (string theory needs at least 11!), no evidence of such extra dimensions has yet presented itself. "Secondly, in the team's model, the interior of a black hole is static," Poplawski continued, explaining that gravitational field equations predict that space-time within the outer boundary of a black hole, the event horizon, can't be static. "Thirdly, their model adds ad hoc an infinite number of terms to the field equations, for the purpose of eliminating a singularity," Poplawski added. "That lacks a solid physical motivation, and it is merely a mathematical exploration of a theory of gravity with extra dimensions." The singularity-busting theory differs from a great deal of other attempts to solve this issue, which take the route of uniting general relativity with quantum physics, our best theory of the universe on subatomic levels, attempting to produce a unifying theory of "quantum gravity." That doesn't mean those theories are any closer to answering the singularity puzzle, however. One of the most favored unification theories is string theory, mentioned above, which replaces point-like particles with vibrating strings. "The problem with string theory is that it requires extra dimensions, for which there is no experimental evidence," Poplawski said. "Also, there are many forms of string theory, so it would be impossible to falsify it. Another problem is that many forms of string theory require the existence of supersymmetric particles, for which there is no experimental evidence. Consequently, string theory is not a physical theory."Poplawski added that attempts to eliminate black hole singularities within a classical physics framework have also failed or will fail because they are entirely mathematical and lack what he describes as "deep physical motivation." Of course, that doesn't mean there is no value in exploring ideas, as the singularity-busting team has done. "There could be some mathematical value to exploring ideas like this," Poplawski said. "Sometimes physicists invent new mathematical techniques or find solutions to equations that could be used in other branches of physics." Related Stories: — James Webb Space Telescope sees little red dots feeding black holes: 'This is how you solve a universe-breaking problem' — Largest-ever discovery of 'missing link' black holes revealed by dark energy camera (video) — Black holes can squash star formation, James Webb Space Telescope finds So does Poplawski think that humanity could ever discover what lies within a black hole and close the book on physics-breaking singularities for good? Yes, but with a caveat. "I believe humanity will discover what lies at the heart of a black hole only if every black hole creates a new universe and our universe was accordingly created in a black hole," Poplawski said, referring to a hypothesis he has been working on since 2010. "If our universe was created in a black hole, its early expansion could be tested with the cosmic microwave background radiation, and possibly in the future, with neutrinos or gravitational waves, which could probe the earlier times in the universe," Poplawski continued. "Otherwise, we would not be able to empirically understand what happens inside a black hole." Getting to the bottom of this mystery may be incredibly difficult, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. Poplawski cited the example of another aspect of physics that emerged from the theory of general relativity and took great perseverance to solve: tiny ripples in space-time called "gravitational waves." "It took 100 years to detect gravitational waves on Earth after Einstein predicted them from his equations of general relativity," Poplawski said. "Therefore, it may take decades before we find out what happens in black holes."
