Tracing Chile’s Indigenous Roots Through Genetics and Linguistics

© Chiara Barbieri

How do today’s indigenous communities of South America trace back to the history of human migration and contact in the continent? An international team has worked to reconstruct the legacy of Chile’s largest indigenous community, the Mapuche, in a quest to strengthen their representation in the history of the continent. It appears the Mapuche long lived in relative isolation but do bear some influences from other populations of the Central Andes and the far south of Chile.

Publication: Epifanía Arango-Isaza, et al., The genetic history of the Southern Andes from present-day Mapuche ancestry, Current Biology (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2023.05.013

Original Story Source: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology