Native American gene flow into Polynesia predating Easter Island settlement (original) (raw)

Data availability

Individual-level genotypes for new data presented here are available through a data-access agreement to respect the privacy of the participants for the transfer of genetic data from the European Genome Archive (EGA; https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ega/home), under accession number EGAS00001004209.

Code availability

Details regarding the packages and versions used are included in the Methods. Codes for the matrix completions described in the paper are available at https://github.com/AlexIoannidis/completion.

References

  1. Brown, J. M. The Riddle of the Pacific (T. F. Unwin, 1924).
  2. Heyerdahl, T. American Indians in the Pacific (Allen & Unwin, 1952).
  3. Yen, D. E. The Sweet Potato and Oceania (Bishop Museum Press, 1974).
  4. Montenegro, A., Avis, C. & Weaver, A. Modeling the prehistoric arrival of the sweet potato in Polynesia. J. Archaeol. Sci. 35, 355–367 (2008).
    Article Google Scholar
  5. Roullier, C., Benoit, L., McKey, D. B. & Lebot, V. Historical collections reveal patterns of diffusion of sweet potato in Oceania obscured by modern plant movements and recombination. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 110, 2205–2210 (2013).
    Article CAS PubMed ADS PubMed Central Google Scholar
  6. Clarke, A. C., Burtenshaw, M. K., McLenachan, P. A., Erickson, D. L. & Penny, D. Reconstructing the origins and dispersal of the Polynesian bottle gourd (Lagenaria siceraria). Mol. Biol. Evol. 23, 893–900 (2006).
    Article CAS PubMed Google Scholar
  7. Muñoz-Rodríguez, P. et al. Reconciling conflicting phylogenies in the origin of sweet potato and dispersal to Polynesia. Curr. Biol. 28, 1246–1256 (2018).
    Article PubMed CAS Google Scholar
  8. Lie, B. A. et al. Molecular genetic studies of natives on Easter Island: evidence of an early European and Amerindian contribution to the Polynesian gene pool. Tissue Antigens 69, 10–18 (2007).
    Article CAS PubMed Google Scholar
  9. Thorsby, E. The Polynesian gene pool: an early contribution by Amerindians to Easter Island. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B 367, 812–819 (2012).
    Article Google Scholar
  10. Moreno-Mayar, J. V. et al. Genome-wide ancestry patterns in Rapanui suggest pre-European admixture with Native Americans. Curr. Biol. 24, 2518–2525 (2014).
    Article CAS PubMed Google Scholar
  11. Fehren-Schmitz, L. et al. Genetic ancestry of Rapanui before and after European contact. Curr. Biol. 27, 3209–3215 (2017).
    Article CAS PubMed Google Scholar
  12. Hagelberg, E., Quevedo, S., Turbon, D. & Clegg, J. B. DNA from ancient Easter Islanders. Nature 369, 25–26 (1994).
    Article CAS PubMed ADS Google Scholar
  13. Wilmshurst, J. M., Hunt, T. L., Lipo, C. P. & Anderson, A. J. High-precision radiocarbon dating shows recent and rapid initial human colonization of East Polynesia. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 108, 1815–1820 (2011).
    Article CAS PubMed ADS Google Scholar
  14. Hunt, T. L. & Lipo, C. P. Late colonization of Easter Island. Science 311, 1603–1606 (2006).
    Article CAS PubMed ADS Google Scholar
  15. Mulrooney, M. A. An island-wide assessment of the chronology of settlement and land use on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) based on radiocarbon data. J. Archaeol. Sci. 40, 4377–4399 (2013).
    Article Google Scholar
  16. Martinsson-Wallin, H., Wallin, P. & Anderson, A. Chronogeographic variation in initial East Polynesian construction of monumental ceremonial sites. J. Island Coastal Archaeol. 8, 405–421 (2013).
    Article Google Scholar
  17. Alexander, D. H., Novembre, J. & Lange, K. Fast model-based estimation of ancestry in unrelated individuals. Genome Res. 19, 1655–1664 (2009).
    Article CAS PubMed PubMed Central Google Scholar
  18. Maples, B. K., Gravel, S., Kenny, E. E. & Bustamante, C. D. RFMix: a discriminative modeling approach for rapid and robust local-ancestry inference. Am. J. Hum. Genet. 93, 278–288 (2013).
    Article CAS PubMed PubMed Central Google Scholar
  19. Liang, M. & Nielsen, R. The lengths of admixture tracts. Genetics 197, 953–967 (2014).
    Article PubMed PubMed Central Google Scholar
  20. Gravel, S. et al. Demographic history and rare allele sharing among human populations. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 108, 11983–11988 (2011).
    Article CAS PubMed ADS PubMed Central Google Scholar
  21. Fischer, S. R. Island at the End of the World (Reaktion Books, 2006).
  22. Maude, H. E. Slavers in Paradise: The Peruvian Slave trade in Polynesia, 1862–1864 (Stanford Univ. Press, 1981).
  23. Hurles, M. E. et al. Native American Y chromosomes in Polynesia: the genetic impact of the Polynesian slave trade. Am. J. Hum. Genet. 72, 1282–1287 (2003).
    Article CAS PubMed PubMed Central Google Scholar
  24. Seemann, B. Flora Vitiensis (L. Reeve, 1865).
  25. Scaglion, R. in The Sweet Potato in Oceania: A Reappraisal (eds Ballard, C. et al.) 35–41 (Oceania Publications, 2005).
  26. Hornell, J. Was there pre-Columbian Contact between the Peoples of Oceania and South America? J. Polynesian Soc. 54, 167–191 (1945).
    Google Scholar
  27. Dewan, L. & Hosler, D. Ancient maritime trade on balsa rafts: an engineering analysis. J. Anthropol. Res. 64, 19–40 (2008).
    Article Google Scholar
  28. Hosler, D. West Mexican metallurgy: revisited and revised. J. World Prehist. 22, 185–212 (2009).
    Article Google Scholar
  29. Callaghan, R. T. Prehistoric trade between Ecuador and West Mexico: a computer simulation of coastal voyages. Antiquity 77, 796–804 (2003).
    Article Google Scholar
  30. Irwin, G. J. Against, across and down the wind: a case for the systematic exploration of the remote Pacific Islands. J. Polynesian Soc. 98, 167–206 (1989).
    Google Scholar
  31. Lewis, D. We, the Navigators (Univ. Hawaii Press, 1994).
  32. Gravel, S. Population genetics models of local ancestry. Genetics 191, 607–619 (2012).
    Article PubMed PubMed Central Google Scholar
  33. Porteous, J. D. The Modernization of Easter Island (Univ. Victoria, 1981).
  34. Loh, P. R. et al. Inferring admixture histories of human populations using linkage disequilibrium. Genetics 193, 1233–1254 (2013).
    Article PubMed PubMed Central Google Scholar
  35. Patterson, N. et al. Ancient admixture in human history. Genetics 192, 1065–1093 (2012).
    Article PubMed PubMed Central Google Scholar
  36. Walworth, M. Eastern Polynesian: the linguistic evidence revisited. Oceanic Linguistics 53, 256–272 (2014).
    Article Google Scholar
  37. Kirch, P. V. & Green, R. C. Hawaiki, Ancestral Polynesia (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001).
  38. Hunt, T. & Lipo, C. The Statues That Walked (Free Press, 2011).
  39. Heyerdahl, T. Fatu-Hiva: Back to Nature (Allen & Unwin, 1974).
  40. Montenegro, Á., Callaghan, R. T. & Fitzpatrick, S. M. Using seafaring simulations and shortest-hop trajectories to model the prehistoric colonization of Remote Oceania. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 113, 12685–12690 (2016).
    Article CAS PubMed PubMed Central Google Scholar
  41. Di Piazza, A., Di Piazza, P. & Pearthree, E. Sailing virtual canoes across Oceania: revisiting island accessibility. J. Archaeol. Sci. 34, 1219–1225 (2007).
    Article Google Scholar
  42. Kirch, P. V. On the Road of the Winds (Univ. California Press, 2017).
  43. Durbin, R. et al. A map of human genome variation from population-scale sequencing. Nature 467, 1061–1073 (2010); corrigendum 473, 544 (2011).
    Article CAS PubMed ADS Google Scholar
  44. de la Fuente, C. et al. Genomic insights into the origin and diversification of late maritime hunter-gatherers from the Chilean Patagonia. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 115, E4006–E4012 (2018).
    Article PubMed CAS PubMed Central Google Scholar
  45. Wojcik, G. L. et al. Genetic analyses of diverse populations improves discovery for complex traits. Nature 570, 514–518 (2019).
    Article CAS PubMed PubMed Central Google Scholar
  46. Bryc, K. et al. Genome-wide patterns of population structure and admixture among Hispanic/Latino populations. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 107 (Suppl 2), 8954–8961 (2010).
    Article CAS PubMed ADS PubMed Central Google Scholar
  47. Posth, C. et al. Reconstructing the deep population history of Central and South America. Cell 175, 1185–1197 (2018).
    Article CAS PubMed PubMed Central Google Scholar
  48. Moreno-Mayar, J. V. et al. Early human dispersals within the Americas. Science 362, eaav2621 (2018).
    Article PubMed ADS CAS Google Scholar
  49. Aitchison, J. The Statistical Analysis of Compositional Data (Chapman and Hall, 1986).
  50. Novembre, J. et al. Genes mirror geography within Europe. Nature 456, 98–101 (2008).
    Article CAS PubMed PubMed Central ADS Google Scholar
  51. Tyner, C. et al. The UCSC Genome Browser database: 2017 update. Nucleic Acids Res. 45 (D1), D626–D634 (2017).
    CAS PubMed Google Scholar
  52. Patterson, N., Price, A. L. & Reich, D. Population structure and eigenanalysis. PLoS Genet. 2, e190 (2006).
    Article PubMed PubMed Central CAS Google Scholar
  53. Chang, C. C. et al. Second-generation PLINK: rising to the challenge of larger and richer datasets. Gigascience 4, 7 (2015).
    Article PubMed PubMed Central CAS Google Scholar
  54. Wickham, H. ggplot2 (Springer, 2016).
  55. Holmes, S. & Huber, W. Modern Statistics for Modern Biology (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2019).
  56. Lawson, D. J., van Dorp, L. & Falush, D. A tutorial on how not to over-interpret STRUCTURE and ADMIXTURE bar plots. Nat. Commun. 9, 3258 (2018).
    Article PubMed PubMed Central ADS CAS Google Scholar
  57. van Dorp, L. et al. Evidence for a common origin of blacksmiths and cultivators in the Ethiopian Ari within the last 4500 years: lessons for clustering-based inference. PLoS Genet. 11, e1005397 (2015).
    Article PubMed PubMed Central CAS Google Scholar
  58. Alexander, D. H. & Lange, K. Enhancements to the ADMIXTURE algorithm for individual ancestry estimation. BMC Bioinformatics 12, 246 (2011).
    Article PubMed PubMed Central Google Scholar
  59. Francis, R. M. pophelper: an R package and web app to analyse and visualize population structure. Mol. Ecol. Resour. 17, 27–32 (2017).
    Article CAS PubMed Google Scholar
  60. Pickrell, J. K. & Pritchard, J. K. Inference of population splits and mixtures from genome-wide allele frequency data. PLoS Genet. 8, e1002967 (2012).
    Article CAS PubMed PubMed Central Google Scholar
  61. Meyer, B. S., Matschiner, M. & Salzburger, W. Disentangling incomplete lineage sorting and introgression to refine species-tree estimates for Lake Tanganyika cichlid fishes. Syst. Zool. 66, 531–550 (2017).
    CAS Google Scholar
  62. van den Boogaart, K. G. & Tolosana-Delgado, R. Analyzing Compositional Data with. (Springer Science & Business Media, 2013).
  63. Homburger, J. R. et al. Genomic insights into the ancestry and demographic history of South America. PLoS Genet. 11, e1005602 (2015).
    Article PubMed PubMed Central CAS Google Scholar
  64. O’Connell, J. et al. A general approach for haplotype phasing across the full spectrum of relatedness. PLoS Genet. 10, e1004234 (2014).
    Article PubMed PubMed Central CAS Google Scholar
  65. Troyanskaya, O. et al. Missing value estimation methods for DNA microarrays. Bioinformatics 17, 520–525 (2001).
    Article CAS PubMed Google Scholar
  66. Browning, S. R. et al. Local ancestry inference in a large US-based Hispanic/Latino study: Hispanic community health study/study of Latinos (HCHS/SOL). G3 Genes Genom. Genet. 6, 1525–1534 (2016).
    Google Scholar
  67. Makarenkov, V. & Lapointe, F.-J. A weighted least-squares approach for inferring phylogenies from incomplete distance matrices. Bioinformatics 20, 2113–2121 (2004).
    Article CAS PubMed Google Scholar
  68. Peter, B. M. Admixture, population structure, and F-statistics. Genetics 202, 1485–1501 (2016).
    Article CAS PubMed PubMed Central Google Scholar
  69. Hastie, T., Tibshirani, R. & Friedman, J. The Elements of Statistical Learning (Springer Science & Business Media, 2009).
  70. Moreno-Estrada, A. et al. Reconstructing the population genetic history of the Caribbean. PLoS Genet. 9, e1003925 (2013).
    Article PubMed PubMed Central CAS Google Scholar
  71. Gusev, A. et al. Whole population, genome-wide mapping of hidden relatedness. Genome Res. 19, 318–326 (2009).
    Article CAS PubMed PubMed Central Google Scholar
  72. Moreno-Estrada, A. et al. The genetics of Mexico recapitulates Native American substructure and affects biomedical traits. Science 344, 1280–1285 (2014).
    Article CAS PubMed PubMed Central ADS Google Scholar
  73. Longobardi, G. et al. Across language families: genome diversity mirrors linguistic variation within Europe. Am. J. Phys. Anthropol. 157, 630–640 (2015).
    Article PubMed PubMed Central Google Scholar
  74. Han, E. et al. Clustering of 770,000 genomes reveals post-colonial population structure of North America. Nat. Commun. 8, 14238 (2017).
    Article CAS PubMed PubMed Central ADS Google Scholar
  75. Epskamp, S., Cramer, A., Waldorp, L. J., Schmittmann, V. D. & Borsboom, D. qgraph: network visualizations of relationships in psychometric data. J. Stat. Softw. 48, 1–18 (2012).
    Article Google Scholar
  76. Pickrell, J. K. et al. Ancient west Eurasian ancestry in southern and eastern Africa. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 111, 2632–2637 (2014).
    Article CAS PubMed ADS PubMed Central Google Scholar

Download references

Acknowledgements

We thank the participants and volunteers who donated DNA samples for this study and the many researchers who contributed to collecting samples, in particular J. Martinson, D. Weatherall and J. Clegg, as well as H.-W. Peng (Taiwan), T. Teariki (Cook Islands) and J. Roux (French Polynesia). We thank P. P. Edmunds Paoa, mayor of the Municipality of Easter Island, the Rapahango family, H. Huke, T. Hotu, O. Hey Riroroko, J. Emilio Estay and S. Fareea for providing local support during fieldwork and community engagement on Rapa Nui. We also thank the Rapa Nui Museum and the Office of Rapa Nui Patrimony for outreach support, and the people of Rapa Nui for making this study possible. We thank M. Stoneking for facilitating access to published data that enabled early stages of the analyses, as well as the ChileGenomico project consortium for providing access to reference genotype data from 16 Aymara individuals and 32 of Mapuche ancestry. We acknowledge the National Institutes of Health (NIH) genome-wide association study (GWAS) Data Repository for granting access to the POPRES data set. We also thank the support from the Core Staff at the UCSF Institute for Human Genetics for contributing with genotyping capacity, and the Stanford Center for Computational, Evolutionary and Human Genomics (CEHG) for supporting the initial stages of this project. We are grateful for genotyping and IT support from J. Cervantes, M. Torres and technicians from LANGEBIO’s Genomics Core Facility at CINVESTAV, Mexico. This work was supported by the George Rosenkranz Prize for Health Care Research in Developing Countries, Mexico’s CONACYT Basic Research Program (grant number CB-2015-01-251380), and the International Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (ICGEB, Italy) grant CRP/MEX15-04_EC (each awarded to A.M.-E.); the American Society of Engineering Education NDSEG Fellowship and the National Library of Medicine (NLM) training grant T15LM007033 (awarded to A.G.I.); the Chilean funding programs FONDEF, FONDECYT and CONICYT (grants D10I1007, 1130303 and USA2013-0015, respectively); and the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Oxford Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) and the Wellcome Trust Fellowship with reference 106289/Z/14/Z (to A.J.M.). Views expressed are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the NIHR, the NHS or the UK Department of Health.

Author information

Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Alexander G. Ioannidis, Javier Blanco-Portillo

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
    Alexander G. Ioannidis
  2. National Laboratory of Genomics for Biodiversity (LANGEBIO), Unit of Advanced Genomics, CINVESTAV, Irapuato, Mexico
    Alexander G. Ioannidis, Javier Blanco-Portillo, Karla Sandoval, Juan Esteban Rodríguez-Rodríguez, Consuelo D. Quinto-Cortés & Andrés Moreno-Estrada
  3. Department of Biosciences, University of Oslo, Blindern, Oslo, Norway
    Erika Hagelberg
  4. Departamento de Gastroenterología, Facultad de Medicina, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile
    Juan Francisco Miquel-Poblete
  5. National Institute of Genomic Medicine (INMEGEN), Mexico City, Mexico
    J. Víctor Moreno-Mayar
  6. Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
    Kathryn Auckland, Tom Parks, Adrian V. S. Hill & Alexander J. Mentzer
  7. MRC Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
    Kathryn Robson
  8. The Jenner Institute, Nuffield Department of Medicine, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
    Adrian V. S. Hill
  9. International Laboratory for Human Genome Research (LIIGH), UNAM Juriquilla, Queretaro, Mexico
    María C. Avila-Arcos
  10. Center for Computational, Evolutionary and Human Genomics (CEHG), Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
    Alexandra Sockell, Julian R. Homburger, Genevieve L. Wojcik & Carlos D. Bustamante
  11. Division of Biomedical Informatics and Personalized Medicine, University of Colorado, Denver, CO, USA
    Kathleen C. Barnes & Christopher R. Gignoux
  12. Human Genetics Program, Institute of Biomedical Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, University of Chile, Santiago, Chile
    Luisa Herrera, Soledad Berríos, Mónica Acuña, Elena Llop, Lucía Cifuentes, Ricardo A. Verdugo & Mauricio Moraga
  13. Program in Pharmaceutical Sciences and Pharmacogenomics, Department of Medicine, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA
    Celeste Eng, Scott Huntsman & Esteban G. Burchard
  14. Basic-Applied Oncology Department, Faculty of Medicine, University of Chile, Santiago, Chile
    Ricardo A. Verdugo
  15. Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Chile, Santiago, Chile
    Mauricio Moraga
  16. Big Data Institute, Li Ka Shing Centre for Health Information and Discovery, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
    Alexander J. Mentzer
  17. Department of Biomedical Data Science, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
    Carlos D. Bustamante

Authors

  1. Alexander G. Ioannidis
  2. Javier Blanco-Portillo
  3. Karla Sandoval
  4. Erika Hagelberg
  5. Juan Francisco Miquel-Poblete
  6. J. Víctor Moreno-Mayar
  7. Juan Esteban Rodríguez-Rodríguez
  8. Consuelo D. Quinto-Cortés
  9. Kathryn Auckland
  10. Tom Parks
  11. Kathryn Robson
  12. Adrian V. S. Hill
  13. María C. Avila-Arcos
  14. Alexandra Sockell
  15. Julian R. Homburger
  16. Genevieve L. Wojcik
  17. Kathleen C. Barnes
  18. Luisa Herrera
  19. Soledad Berríos
  20. Mónica Acuña
  21. Elena Llop
  22. Celeste Eng
  23. Scott Huntsman
  24. Esteban G. Burchard
  25. Christopher R. Gignoux
  26. Lucía Cifuentes
  27. Ricardo A. Verdugo
  28. Mauricio Moraga
  29. Alexander J. Mentzer
  30. Carlos D. Bustamante
  31. Andrés Moreno-Estrada

Contributions

A.M.-E. and K.S. conceived the study. A.M.-E., A.G.I., A.J.M. and C.D.B. provided overall project supervision and management. A.M.-E., E.H., R.A.V., M.M., A.J.M., C.D.B. and C.R.G. contributed to study design. A.S., G.L.W., K.C.B., C.E., S.H., E.G.B., C.D.B. and A.M.-E. carried out genotyping experiments and quality control. A.G.I., J.B.-P., J.V.M.-M., J.E.R.-R., C.D.Q.-C., J.R.H. and A.M.-E. analysed the data. A.G.I. developed the analytical methods. A.M.-E., A.G.I. and J.B.-P. interpreted the results. A.M.-E., K.S., E.H., J.F.M.-P., K.A., T.P., K.R., A.V.S.H., M.C.A.-A., A.S., G.L.W., K.C.B., L.H., S.B., M.A., E.L., C.E., S.H., E.G.B., L.C., R.A.V., M.M., A.J.M. and C.D.B. contributed to acquisition of the data. A.G.I. wrote the manuscript, and A.G.I., A.M.-E., E.H., J.B.-P., J.V.M.-M. and M.M. edited the manuscript.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence toAlexander G. Ioannidis or Andrés Moreno-Estrada.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

C.D.B. is a member of the scientific advisory boards for Liberty Biosecurity, Personalis, 23andMe Roots into the Future, Ancestry.com, IdentifyGenomics, Genomelink and Etalon and is a founder of CDB Consulting. C.R.G. owns stock in 23andMe and is a member of the scientific advisory board for Encompass Bioscience.

Additional information

Peer review information Nature thanks John Lindo, Paul Wallin and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Supplementary information

Rights and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Ioannidis, A.G., Blanco-Portillo, J., Sandoval, K. et al. Native American gene flow into Polynesia predating Easter Island settlement.Nature 583, 572–577 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2487-2

Download citation