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It's only 500 years old. Its relatives would be alive today, no? So is this headline, then, a little click-baity?
by hackaflocka 11y ago
It's only 500 years old. Its relatives would be alive today, no? So is this headline, then, a little click-baity?
- laurencerowe 11y agoIt's interesting because so much genetic diversity was lost after the conquest: > Llamas is not surprised that a potentially common pre-Columbian genetic group all but disappeared after the Spanish arrived. “Up to 90% of native South Americans died very quickly” after the conquest, mostly from epidemic disease, he says. “You can imagine that a lot of genetic diversity was lost as well.” Especially in the Americas, where such an extreme demographic collapse was followed by centuries of mixing by European, Amerindian, and African groups, the genes of living people “aren’t always a faithful representation of what happened in the past,” Salas says. The Aconcagua boy’s genome, on the other hand, is “a window to 500 years ago.”
- jacquesm 11y agoQuite a few people living only 70 years ago have no living relatives today.
- phaemon 11y agoThat obviously depends on what you mean by "relatives". Odds are that a random human chosen from anywhere on earth is no more than your 16th cousin. All life on earth is your relation (as far as anyone knows).
- BigChiefSmokem 11y agoI'm guessing he means direct ancestry.
- jacquesm 11y agoThink World War II.
- asveikau 11y ago"Only 500 years" - really, this needs explaining? Columbus left Spain 523 years ago to put the "Latin" in Latin America. Wikipedia suggests the first major European visit to Argentina where this was found happened 499 years ago. Needless to say there have been massive demographics changes in the continent since then.