Carlos García-Sívoli

El objetivo de este trabajo se centra análisis morfogeométrico del paladar duro y el agujero palatino mayor en cráneos de dos cementerios prehispánicos del Valle de Quíbor-Venezuela por medio de un análisis multivariante. Los resultados que se presentan apoyan la teoría del poblamiento venezolano a través de las redes fluviales del río Orinoco, así como, la continuidad biológica de los individuos enterrados en ambos cementerios.

El presente artículo busca identificar los microorganismos fosilizados que se puedan encontrar en el cálculo dental de 15 muestras (2 cráneos, 3 maxilares y 10 mandíbulas), provenientes de la necrópolis Antigua de Santa Lucía de Mucuchíes (Siglos XV-XIX), Mucuchíes, estado Mérida, Venezuela.

Humans settled the Caribbean ~6,000 years ago, with intensified agriculture and ceramic use marking a shift from the Archaic Age to the Ceramic Age ~2,500 years ago. To shed new light on the history of Caribbean people, we report genome-wide data from 184 individuals predating European contact from The Bahamas, Cuba, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, Curaçao, and northwestern Venezuela. A largely homogeneous ceramic-using population most likely originating in northeastern South America and related to present-day Arawak-speaking groups moved throughout the Caribbean at least 1,800 years ago, spreading ancestry that is still detected in parts of the region today. These people eventually almost entirely replaced Archaic-related lineages in Hispaniola but not in northwestern Cuba, where unadmixed Archaic-related ancestry persisted into the last millennium. We document high mobility and inter-island connectivity throughout the Ceramic Age as reflected in relatives buried ~75 kilometers apart in Hispaniola and low genetic differentiation across many Caribbean islands, albeit with subtle population structure distinguishing the Bahamian islands we studied from the rest of the Caribbean and from each other, and long-term population continuity in southeastern coastal Hispaniola differentiating this region from the rest of the island. Ceramic-associated people avoided close kin unions despite limited mate pools reflecting low effective population sizes (2N _e =1000-2000) even at sites on the large Caribbean islands. While census population sizes can be an order of magnitude larger than effective population sizes, pan-Caribbean population size estimates of hundreds of thousands are likely too large. Transitions in pottery styles show no evidence of being driven by waves of migration of new people from mainland South America; instead, they more likely reflect the spread of ideas and people within an interconnected Caribbean world.