Ancient nuclear genomes enable repatriation of Indigenous human remains.
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Authors
Westaway, Michael C
Fourmile, Gudju Gudju
Young, Michael
Johnson, Trish
Slade, Joan
Kennedy, Roy
Winch, Patsy
Pappin, Mary
Wales, Tapij
Bates, William Badger
Hamilton, Sharnie
Whyman, Neville
van Holst Pellekaan, Sheila
McAllister, Peter J
Taçon, Paul SC
Malaspinas, Anna-Sapfo
Publication Date
2018-12Journal Title
Sci Adv
ISSN
2375-2548
Publisher
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Volume
4
Issue
12
Pages
eaau5064
Language
eng
Type
Article
This Version
VoR
Physical Medium
Electronic-eCollection
Metadata
Show full item recordCitation
Wright, J. L., Wasef, S., Heupink, T. H., Westaway, M. C., Rasmussen, S., Pardoe, C., Fourmile, G. G., et al. (2018). Ancient nuclear genomes enable repatriation of Indigenous human remains.. Sci Adv, 4 (12), eaau5064. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aau5064
Abstract
After European colonization, the ancestral remains of Indigenous people were often collected for scientific research or display in museum collections. For many decades, Indigenous people, including Native Americans and Aboriginal Australians, have fought for their return. However, many of these remains have no recorded provenance, making their repatriation very difficult or impossible. To determine whether DNA-based methods could resolve this important problem, we sequenced 10 nuclear genomes and 27 mitogenomes from ancient pre-European Aboriginal Australians (up to 1540 years before the present) of known provenance and compared them to 100 high-coverage contemporary Aboriginal Australian genomes, also of known provenance. We report substantial ancient population structure showing strong genetic affinities between ancient and contemporary Aboriginal Australian individuals from the same geographic location. Our findings demonstrate the feasibility of successfully identifying the origins of unprovenanced ancestral remains using genomic methods.
Keywords
Humans, DNA, Mitochondrial, Genetics, Population, Genomics, Phylogeny, Alleles, Genome, Human, Forensic Anthropology, Databases, Genetic, Australia, Body Remains
Identifiers
External DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aau5064
This record's URL: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/289617
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