Overview
- The lineage first appears about 8,500 years ago and remains the predominant ancestry in central Argentina for roughly 8,000 years.
- Analysis of remains spanning up to 10,000 years increases the region’s ancient DNA sample size by more than tenfold.
- Middle Holocene groups with distinct ancestries coexisted with little inter-regional gene flow despite cultural and linguistic diversity.
- The central Argentina ancestry spread south roughly 3,300 years ago or earlier, admixing with Pampas populations and later becoming dominant there.
- The team compared the new sequences with 588 ancient genomes using SNP-based methods, a resource that senior author David Reich says will enable refined demographic maps for Argentina.