Abstract
The Isthmus of Panama was a crossroads between North and South America during the continent’s first peopling (and subsequent movements) also playing a pivotal role during European colonization and the African slave trade. Previous analyses of uniparental systems revealed significant sex biases in the genetic history of Panamanians, as testified by the high proportions of Indigenous and sub-Saharan mitochondrial DNAs (mtDNAs) and by the prevalence of Western European/northern African Y chromosomes. Those studies were conducted on the general population without considering any self-reported ethnic affiliations. Here, we compared the mtDNA and Y-chromosome lineages of a new sample collection from 431 individuals (301 males and 130 females) belonging to either the general population, mixed groups, or one of five Indigenous groups currently living in Panama. We found different proportions of paternal and maternal lineages in the Indigenous groups testifying to pre-contact demographic events and genetic inputs (some dated to Pleistocene times) that created genetic structure. Then, while the local mitochondrial gene pool was marginally involved in post-contact admixtures, the Indigenous Y chromosomes were differentially replaced, mostly by lineages of western Eurasian origin. Finally, our new estimates of the sub-Saharan contribution, on a more accurately defined general population, reduce an apparent divergence between genetic and historical data.
Highlights
The Isthmus of Panama was an obligatory passage for the first peopling of the Americas and has served as a crossroads in the movement of people and goods ever since, playing a pivotal role during European colonization and the African slave trade [1,2,3]
Even if a deeper classification into sub-haplogroups could be achieved through a massive sequencing of entire mitogenomes and non-recombining regions of the Y chromosome, the main goal of the present work was to compare the different sources of uniparental haplogroups
This imbalance has been attributed to warfare and forced displacements of enslaved Indigenous males, which consolidated the female bias of post-contact Indigenous American survival
Summary
The Isthmus of Panama was an obligatory passage for the first peopling of the Americas and has served as a crossroads in the movement of people and goods ever since, playing a pivotal role during European colonization and the African slave trade [1,2,3]. According to palaeoecological and archaeological data, a human presence in Panama is attested from ≈16,000 years ago (kya) [4,5]. Around 3 kya, three Cultural Regions can be distinguished along the Isthmus: Greater Chiriquí (today the western provinces of Chiriquí and Bocas del Toro, extending into present-day Costa Rica, and the Indigenous Comarcas of the Naso Tjër Di, and the Ngäbe and Bugle), the most coherent historical unit [8], speaking Nuclear Chibchan languages [9]; Greater Coclé (today the central provinces of Coclé and Veraguas, and the Azuero Peninsula), a culturally coherent unit, even though it is not known whether it was linguistically united; Greater Darién (East Panama and Darién provinces, and four Indigenous Comarcas—three Guna and one Emberá and Wounaan). It is argued that some vernaculars spoken at pre-contact villages in the Pacific watershed of today’s Darien and East Panama provinces were of Chocoan heritage [10,11,12]
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