Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
The origin of Assateague’s wild horses has remained a mystery for centuries, but new genetic data supports the theory that they descended from Spanish horses marooned on the barrier island. Credit: Florida Museum photo by Jeff Gage
An abandoned Caribbean colony discovered centuries later and a case of mistaken identity in the archaeological record have colluded to rewrite the history of a barrier island off the shores of Virginia and Maryland.
When Nicolas Delsol, a postdoctoral researcher at the Florida Museum of Natural History, set out to analyze ancient DNA recovered from cow bones discovered in archaeological sites, these seemingly unrelated threads were woven together. Delsol wanted to know how cattle were domesticated in the Americas, and he discovered the answer in the genetic information preserved in centuries-old teeth. However, they also held a surprise.
“It was a serendipitous finding,” he said. “I was sequencing mitochondrial DNA from fossil cow teeth for my Ph.D. and realized something was very different with one of the specimens when I analyzed the sequences.”
That’s because the specimen in question, a portion of an adult molar, was a horse tooth rather than a cow tooth. According to recent research published in PLOS ONE, the DNA extracted from the tooth is also the oldest ever sequenced for a domesticated horse from the Americas.
The tooth was discovered during the excavation of one of Spain’s oldest colonized settlements. Puerto Real, located on the island of Hispaniola, was founded in 1507 and served as the final port of call for ships traveling from the Caribbean for decades. In the 16th century, however, widespread piracy and the expansion of illegal commerce drove the Spanish to concentrate their influence elsewhere on the island, and people were ordered to abandon Puerto Real in 1578. The abandoned settlement was razed by Spanish authorities the following year.
The ruins of the once-bustling harbor were unexpectedly uncovered in 1975 by a medical missionary called William Hodges. Between 1979 and 1990, archaeologists headed by Florida Museum distinguished research curator Kathleen Deagan excavated the site.
[...] The specimen’s biggest surprise wasn’t revealed until Delsol compared its DNA with that of modern horses from around the world. Given that the Spanish brought their horses from the Iberian Peninsula in southern Europe, he expected horses still living in that region would be the closest living relatives of the 500-year-old Puerto Real specimen.
Instead, Delsol found its next of kin over 1,000 miles north of Hispaniola, on the island of Assateague off the coast of Maryland and Virginia. Feral horses have roamed freely across the long stretch of barrier island for hundreds of years, but exactly how they got there has remained a mystery.
Reference: “Analysis of the earliest complete mtDNA genome of a Caribbean colonial horse (Equus caballus) from 16th-century Haiti” by Nicolas Delsol, Brian J. Stucky, Jessica A. Oswald, Elizabeth J. Reitz, Kitty F. Emery and Robert Guralnick, 27 July 2022, PLOS ONE.
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0270600
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday September 14 2022, @03:35PM (1 child)
Somehow, the past ~600 years just don't seem to qualify.
Two internet searches, and a half dozen articles convinces me that I don't want to dive too deeply into that. One "definition" offered is, anything that you care to dismiss as unimportant is to be considered ancient. In which case, all of history before the cell phone can be considered ancient. Others point to various events as the end of ancient history. Personally, I think that Columbus and his contemporaries were pretty modern, in terms of history.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by donkeyhotay on Thursday September 15 2022, @12:14AM
I don't know what archaeologists consider "ancient", but I too would think that would be pretty far beyond 600 years ago. Personally, I would draw the line at about 1 AD or CE or whatever system you like, but something from Smithsonian says before the middle ages, i.e., 600 CE.