Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
70th Anniversary, Announcement James D. Watson And Francis Crick Discovered Structure Of DNA Molecule (28th February 1953) - Ep 10
550 Plays1 year ago
The discovery of the structure of the DNA molecule is one of the most important scientific advancement events of our history, because of it we can trace genetic ancestries, determine relation, alter or determine the most appropriate agricultural species for a region, develop targeted medicines, etc. etc. etc. This is a significant anniversary that we at The Flipside are privileged to be able to explore with Dr. Maria Nieves-Colón, who is an educator and anthropological geneticist at the University of Minnesota, the lab that Dr. Nieves-Colón is a scientist with there produces some truly exceptional research. This was a truly wonderful and informative discussion, that was genuinely inspiring. Ancient DNA is an important aspect of our toolkit which does not hold all the answers but can enhance our interpretation as archaeologists.
Links
- The Virtual Museum - muafrosanluis.pe - This project it truly brilliant and incredibly expressive so do take a look!
- Check out the work of… Dr. Jada Benn Tores and Dr. Raquel Fleskes.
- For further anthropological genetics news, scholars, etc. the AAAG (American Association of Anthropological Genetics).
- Intro/Outro Music - Creative Commons - "Fantasia Fantasia" Kevin MacLeod (http://incompetech.com ). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License. Creative Commons — Attribution 4.0 International — CC BY 4.0
Music
Intro/Outro Music - Creative Commons - "Fantasia Fantasia" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Contact
- Contact
ArchPodNet
- APN Website: https://www.archpodnet.com
- APN on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/archpodnet
- APN on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/archpodnet
- APN on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/archpodnet
- Tee Public Store
Affiliates
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Flipside Podcast
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
Meet Dr. Maria Niev-Colón
00:00:20
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Flipside. This is, as always, the podcast which brings to you important discussions about the past, prompted by specific historical events. This month I am joined by Dr. Maria Niev-Colón. She is an anthropological geneticist who uses ancient DNA and modern genomics tools to examine human population histories.
00:00:46
Speaker
specifically with a focus on the Caribbean and Latin America.
Sustainable Ancient DNA Research
00:00:51
Speaker
She is also a lecturer in the College of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota. Amongst her recent work is a publication focused on recommendations for sustainable ancient DNA research in the Global South. This is a particularly insightful discussion regarding the current state of ancient DNA research in the Global South.
00:01:16
Speaker
This research is also particularly pertinent to the discussion today. As such for this reason and the reason that she is a delightful human being to talk to in the first instance anyway, we are delighted that Dr. Maria Niev-Colon agreed to join us for this discussion today. So you're probably all wondering what inspired the discussion today.
70th Anniversary of DNA Discovery
00:01:40
Speaker
And it's a big anniversary event.
00:01:44
Speaker
The month of February 2023 sees the 70th anniversary of the announcement by James D. Watson and Francis Crick that they had discovered the structure of the DNA molecule, precisely on the 28th of February 1953. Those that are sharpest amongst you might have realised that I've held this episode back a bit, and that's with a very particular purpose in mind. Because...
00:02:12
Speaker
On the 8th of March of this year, it's International Women's Day, and that has particular prevalence to me in regard to this anniversary. Because hidden behind the discovery supposedly made by James Watson and Francis Crick is the name Rosalind Franklin. In fact,
00:02:34
Speaker
Watson and Crick built on much of her work, not necessarily with her permission either. In fact, if circumstances had changed just slightly,
00:02:48
Speaker
It would be Rosalind Franklin's name that we would associate with the discovery of DNA. Without further ado, because I know without a doubt I'll go over time, let's get on with the discussion.
Tracing Human History with DNA
00:03:00
Speaker
Right, so I guess the obvious place to start here would be what is ancient DNA? What can we expect you to be talking about or referring to when you refer to DNA methodologies in relation to archaeological research?
00:03:16
Speaker
And what are the materials we can actually sample and engage with and what is it specifically about those samples which makes them suitable to applied DNA extraction methodologies. So I guess what I'm asking really is how does this all work? It seems quite
00:03:39
Speaker
advanced science and really, really cool when you first hear about some of the discoveries which have been made. Yeah, so DNA as applied to archaeology can be used in two different ways. One is looking at the genetic diversity of living human communities or living organisms. And when you look at the genomes of
00:04:03
Speaker
animals or humans that are living, you can trace population dynamics, evolutionary pathways to the past, because obviously everything that is alive today had ancestors that lived some time in the past. And so by looking at their DNA, we can reconstruct past events, but there's a limit to doing that because not all the genetic diversity that existed in the past has continued on to the present. And so if you really want to gain
00:04:28
Speaker
a direct window into the genetic variation that existed in ancient time periods, then you have to rely on ancient DNA, which is the DNA that is preserved in archaeological or sub-fossil remains from people, organisms who lived in the past.
00:04:46
Speaker
And so in order to do that, or in order to do ancient DNA research, we have to sample the remains of these organisms. And so often this means that we're sampling bone or teeth. Sometimes we sample coprolites, which is almost fossilized waste products, right? Poop. But also we can sample things like eggshells if we want to look at, for example,
00:05:10
Speaker
let's say ancient bird populations. Sometimes archaeological artifacts also have organic remains in them. You can think of things like cloaks, which often are made of feathers or might be made of animal hair. And perhaps there's an archaeological question as to how these communities were sourcing these materials or interacting with them. And so we might also look into ancient DNA in those contexts.
00:05:32
Speaker
And of course, there's always plant remains. We might want to know what plants were being domesticated. So we might have to sample things like ancient seeds or pieces of plant tissue that may have survived in cookware or in ancient houses, et cetera. So there's a lot of different sources that you can use to sample ancient DNA from, but they all have in common is that they are mostly degraded and damaged because of the time that has passed since that organism was living to the moment in which it was sampled.
00:06:01
Speaker
I suppose in that respect, archaeology presents a unique issue in terms of studies involving DNA, in that most of the samples that are engaged with will have significant aspects of degrading.
Challenges in Sampling Ancient DNA
00:06:21
Speaker
So in that respect, any DNA recovered would be quite incomplete, and quite apart from that could be quite
00:06:30
Speaker
muddled, so to speak, in that within archaeological contexts we often find quite a severe level of infiltration. I can imagine it would be quite difficult to extract not only a complete DNA sequence but a DNA sequence which wasn't affected by presence of other DNA within the same context.
00:06:59
Speaker
It's an interesting aspect to note that within archaeology we still don't fully understand the effect of natural soil processes such as water infiltration and disturbance.
00:07:14
Speaker
through various vectors. Well, we don't understand what effect those factors have on the stratigraphies that we rely on. Is this something that you yourself have experience with or have to battle when you're undertaking a project? Contaminance is the word I was looking for. Yeah. So how do you deal with contaminants in such a
00:07:42
Speaker
complex and sensitive process.
00:07:48
Speaker
Okay, well, I will just say that a major limitation or a major consideration that you have to have when you're working with ancient DNA samples is that DNA is not as well preserved as it would be if you were sampling, say, a living person or a living animal or a plant. Because when an organism dies and it starts to decompose, the genetic material that's within the body also decomposes. And so a characteristic of all ancient DNA samples is that
00:08:15
Speaker
DNA is very fragmented and it is also damaged. So you might have changes in the DNA sequence that are not due to biological variation that this organism had during their lifetime, but instead is damage that occurs after death. And so that makes it really challenging to both retrieve the DNA, but also analyze it.
00:08:36
Speaker
And because it's so damaged and degraded, ancient DNA is also really susceptible to external contamination. And so that means that anyone who touches the organic tissues that we might be working with could contaminate them with the DNA that is on our bodies.
00:08:52
Speaker
And so because of that, ancient DNA research is, first of all, very expensive because we have to treat these samples with a lot of care. We have to work in dedicated laboratory spaces. These spaces usually look kind of like a biohazard lab. We wear full body suits. We cover every single part of our skin. So we're not coming directly into contact with these samples.
00:09:17
Speaker
But the idea is not to protect us from the samples, it's to protect the samples from us, from the DNA that's on our body. And it also means that you have to work very slowly because you have to be very careful not to cause any additional damage to this very fragile piece of DNA that you're sampling. So there are multiple limitations to this magic methodology, which is ancient DNA.
00:09:41
Speaker
There is this issue as well that there's something about researchers that gets incredibly excited whenever a new methodology appears. To some extent, it becomes the magic bullet for a while in terms of having all the answers to our research.
Interdisciplinary Approaches in Ancient DNA
00:10:01
Speaker
That's a good thing. It's a good thing for the research community to get
00:10:06
Speaker
excited about new developments, but it's also an issue in that then we have to go back and reinterpret some of the discussions, etc, that were had immediately after a new technique was released. In particular, interpretation is an issue with ancient DNA. There are multiple limitations in regard to that.
00:10:30
Speaker
I'm thinking in particular of this notion that it can give us the full picture in terms of what human communities in the past genetically looked like. And I don't mean that in a literal sense. I mean that in the sense of this is what their DNA sequence was. I just wondered what your thoughts were on aspects like that in terms of
00:10:58
Speaker
acknowledging that we don't know the full extent of human genetic diversity in the past, and we are unlikely to ever know that, I think, personally. Yeah, I would say there's multiple limitations to ancient DNA research, just like there are many potentials. One limitation is that ancient DNA doesn't preserve equally in every single part of the world. So places that are very cold, that are dry,
00:11:27
Speaker
are going to have archaeological and maybe even paleontological remains that have a lot more DNA preserved within them. And so this is why, for example, we can retrieve the full genome of a Neanderthal that lived in Northern Europe much more easily than we can retrieve ancient DNA from
00:11:48
Speaker
peoples that might have lived only 2,000 years ago in any tropical region of the world. Because in warmer places, we have less DNA preservation. And so that means that we have inherently a skew in our picture of ancient genetic diversity. We know a lot more about the ancient variation of peoples that lived in Eurasia, especially in northern regions of Eurasia, or perhaps in places like the Patagonia, because those places have a lot better DNA preservation.
00:12:16
Speaker
There's also the imitation of time. So in the early days of ancient DNA research in the late 80s and 90s, people were very excited about the possibility of extracting ancient DNA from dinosaurs. And if you look at those early papers, you'll see there were several attempts of people trying to extract DNA from amber, kind of like they did in Jurassic Park, right?
00:12:37
Speaker
But unfortunately, we now know that ancient DNA doesn't preserve that far back in time. So the oldest ancient DNA genome that has been published is a horse that's around 700,000 years ago that lived in Europe. There's also been a mammoth that's about 1 million years ago whose genome has been published. And so somewhere between 700,000 to a million years is the limit as far as we know right now. Because at some point, the DNA just disappears.
00:13:06
Speaker
So you have these two limitations, a geographical limitation and a temporal limitation. And in addition to that, the third limitation I would say is that how much
Ethics of Ancient DNA Research
00:13:16
Speaker
can ancient DNA illuminate a specific research question is very dependent on the archaeological context that you're using to ask that question.
00:13:25
Speaker
So genetic information is very useful, it's very important, but it doesn't always give you the full picture of an ancient society or how they're interacting with the natural world, right? So you also need other forms of evidence and that might mean that you need to contextualize ancient DNA data or ground it within what you know about
00:13:47
Speaker
how people were interacting with material culture or with each other or health status as ascertained through the looking at osteological analyses or historical documents. But if you focus solely on the genetic data, while that might maybe informative, it's not informative on its own. At least that's not how I think we can maximize the informative potential of this tool.
00:14:10
Speaker
That just speaks to the brilliance that is this emergence of interdisciplinarity within research, because
00:14:19
Speaker
We're finding out so much more together than we ever did when we were working by ourselves in our own subject groups. I'm thinking in particular, in terms of plant DNA studies, there was a particular focus on looking at why adaptions occurred, what provoked those adaptions, and within DNA, which we could see.
00:14:44
Speaker
Quite often it was suggested that these were adaptions in responses to change in environment, natural changes within the environment.
00:14:54
Speaker
However, when paleoenvironmental data was compared alongside that, in a great many instances, there wasn't any evidence for the significant environmental change which could provoke those genetic changes, those adaptions within plant species, which then leads us to look at, was it human interference?
00:15:17
Speaker
that caused these. We can be a lot more critical and interrogative when we work with our research, when we're also engaging with interdisciplinarity. Because quite simply, it takes a while for some ideas to filter down into archaeology. But when we work more closely with our colleagues in other disciplines,
00:15:46
Speaker
we bridge that gap. And that is something which is happening, which I think is utterly wonderful. Oh, that's interesting. But I think in that case where you have genetic data and you have other lines of evidence that don't match up, I don't think all is lost necessarily, right? That can lead to a more interesting question, which is, well, why don't these two match up? Are there perhaps other factors that could explain that? Maybe
00:16:12
Speaker
humans are selecting traits in a plant over time. And so what you're seeing is evidence of artificial selection, or maybe there are other factors that have to do with climactic conditions or other reasons why you're seeing this mismatch. And so I actually think that that is a piece of evidence in itself. And we see that a lot, right? We see that in other questions. So a big question in archaeology has been, for example, the peopling of the Americas.
00:16:39
Speaker
And for a long time, we didn't have a lot of ancient DNA, so most hypotheses about this early movement were based on archaeological or linguistic studies. And when the first genetic research
00:16:55
Speaker
which included both ancient DNA and modern DNA studies, started to come out, those hypotheses that were based on archaeology were not always consonant with what we were finding in the genetic record. Now, does that mean that archaeological hypotheses are inherently incorrect? Not necessarily, because we're looking at two pieces of evidence that are explaining
00:17:16
Speaker
different parts of this phenomenon, different parts of this movement, right? And they're also a little bit at different scales. So humans produce material culture much faster than genetic variants are able to spread through the population, which is not the same for other organisms, right? Like bacteria or mice, right? It would be different.
00:17:35
Speaker
And so what you're looking at are two different movements that sometimes might occur at the same time, but other times might not. And so when those two lines of evidence don't match, I think what that leads to is more interesting research, because now you're trying to explore why they don't match up. This is making me think in particular of the Bell Beaker phenomenon, which is essentially a techno complex.
00:17:58
Speaker
specifically associated with a material cultural artefact known as a bell beaker because it is a beaker shaped, believe it or not like a bell. And there's controversy regarding this because there have been studies which suggested that the physical migration of the people associated with the techno-culture
00:18:24
Speaker
are responsible for the spread of this material-cultural artefact across Europe. Those have been associated with AD&A studies. However, this suggests that material cultures can't travel independent of the material-cultural techno-complex they represent, which isn't the case, because obviously trade is a thing.
00:18:50
Speaker
So there have been suggestions that there was significant societal combination, but in reality it could just be that this form of material culture was particularly appreciated and so it was traded widely across Europe. Now this misunderstanding could have been
00:19:10
Speaker
combated slightly, I think, if there was more communication. But as I said, this was quite an early study. So we've come quite a long way in terms of how we work together since then. And it just makes me think how difficult it must be to try and reconstruct movement of ancient peoples in terms of
00:19:30
Speaker
the archaeological sense, if a material culture is there, we can suggest or assume there has been some contact between cultures. But beyond that, looking at certain studies that have used ancient DNA to track movement and development of cultures across entire continents and through vast temporal periods, movement must be so difficult to study.
00:19:57
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And I also think that you are inherently working with two sources of information that are incomplete, right? Because when you're looking at movement through the archaeological record and you're looking at material culture, I mean, I'm sure that you have already spoken many times in your podcast to other professionals who have spoken about the spottyness of the archaeological record.
Cultural Identity vs. Genetic Heritage
00:20:18
Speaker
But we also have a spotty genetic record, right? Because we don't have the full genome of every single person who lived during a time period.
00:20:25
Speaker
And so what we have are small samples, small snippets, small pictures of the genetic variation that existed at that time in those individuals who happened to have remains that were amenable for sampling, that happened to have sufficient DNA preserved. And so you are reconstructing a broad movement with just little windows into the full picture. So of course, there's going to be difficulty in linking those two together.
00:20:54
Speaker
Definitely. I think we as archaeologists are always working and doomed to always be working on a 500-piece jigsaw with only around 300 pieces left in the box. Yeah. Well, Asian DNA is kind of similar. The difference is that with DNA, you don't just get the DNA of an individual, but you can also extrapolate back and look at the ancestors of that individual. So this is why even if you have two or three
00:21:23
Speaker
people whose genomes were recovered from a certain time period, you can make some inferences about the broader population because they are part of a genetic population. And so now one limitation or one challenge, I think, is taking that genetic population and translating it to an archaeological population, right? Those two things are not necessarily the same.
00:21:47
Speaker
So I always give my own heritage as an example. So I'm from the Caribbean, and I have an admixed genome, right? If you looked at my genome, you would be able to trace back the stories of my ancestors who came from many different parts of the world. Some ancestors came from sub-Saharan Africa, others came from the indigenous Americas, and others came from Europe.
00:22:08
Speaker
But that doesn't mean that my identity as an individual was either one of those three, because my identity is of a modern Caribbean person. And so that difference is not necessarily visible in the genome, even though if I looked at my own genome, I would be able to reconstruct some of those movements. Does that kind of make sense?
00:22:28
Speaker
That's a really interesting point actually because I think our DNA, our genetic code, has become so much a part of what we consider our identity in the modern world. The difficulty in difference is that archaeologically we're referring to identity based on material cultures.
00:22:49
Speaker
Obviously, these communities would not have known about DNA. They would have known about ancestral progression, so to speak. But we can't know what mattered to these people in terms of what their identity actually was. Beyond that, when we look at the archaeological record, we see a spread of material culture which we associate with
00:23:13
Speaker
many, many different techno complexes, cultures, peoples. And because of that, we can recognize diversity in some respect within archaeological communities. And I suspect that is another difference from what we have when we look at ancient DNA. What does diversity mean within the context of ancient DNA and how does that differ?
00:23:39
Speaker
from what we're speaking of when we're talking archaeology? Well, we can see diverse genetic lineages when we look at population-level genetic diversity. The challenge is that sometimes those lineages may or may not match up with material cultures, right? So you might have peoples who, during their lifetimes, were using different material cultures that if we looked at them
00:24:04
Speaker
purely from an archaeological record perspective might look like different populations. And there's good reason to think that, right? Because we have a lot of ethnoarchaeological research that suggests this. But that might not necessarily translate into different genetic lineages. So I would be cautious of equating a given haplogroup or haplotype to a given archaeological culture. Because to be honest, usually the picture is a bit more complicated than that.
00:24:30
Speaker
However, we do sometimes see evidence of populations moving into different locations where we see a change in material culture and we also see a gradual change in their genetic diversity. And you brought up the bell beaker phenomenon. We also see this associated to other movements in Europe, right? We see the movement of peoples who had different material culture and possibly more use of agriculture and herding behaviors.
00:24:56
Speaker
moving into Europe, and that's somewhat associated with this step ancestry component. And we see that, but it doesn't necessarily happen like that every time. So in the region that I work in, which is in the Caribbean, we see a somewhat similar situation. So we know the first peopling of the Caribbean occurred by a group that is genetically differentiated from other populations that came in later, bringing with them a different form of material culture.
00:25:22
Speaker
However, after that second migration happens, we see changes in material culture that we're not so sure if they represent additional movements or if they represent local evolution, cultural evolution, that doesn't really match up with the genetic diversity. We need to do more research to ascertain which of those two scenarios is true or if there are other scenarios that we just haven't considered. I think that can manifest in a very particular way in archaeology in terms of
00:25:51
Speaker
It's a relatively difficult thing for any researcher to do, to step back and recognise that their personal lived experience and their notion of what is normal in terms of societal relationships, for example,
00:26:11
Speaker
is in no way applicable to the lived experiences of people in the past and within the archaeological record. I'm thinking in particular of an example from High Pasture Cave, which is on the Isle of Skye.
00:26:26
Speaker
Now there's a burial there with an adult female and an infant and I think a young child as well. It was assumed in the excavation report that these individuals were all genetically related.
00:26:46
Speaker
Now, when the genetic study, the ADNA study was actually done, it was found that the woman wasn't related genetically to the infant but was to the small child. Now, in one respect, that can indicate to us as researchers that
00:27:10
Speaker
ideas concerning relation and responsibility and societal connections weren't based necessarily on relation in the past.
00:27:24
Speaker
This could also be an instance of adoption, for example, although that probably doesn't mean exactly what we think it to mean today. It's difficult for us to without a doubt understand why these individuals ended up together.
00:27:42
Speaker
Perhaps it's incidental in a way. Maybe the infant died at the same time as this woman and child. As an act of compassion, a grieving community buried them together.
00:27:57
Speaker
It could be that this infant was adopted into this family, or it could be another explanation entirely, but I think this demonstrates just how many interpretive possibilities we have when we overcome our own biases in terms of how we see the world.
00:28:19
Speaker
Yeah, so that makes me think of a lot of other examples in which ancient DNA research has demonstrated that individuals who were buried with material culture suggestive of warrior roles during their lifetimes were assumed to be chromosomal males. And then when ancient DNA research has been performed, it's turned out that many of them were actually chromosomal females, right? And so that's also an indication, right? But I actually kind of want to throw a bomb in this argument a little bit because
00:28:49
Speaker
in returning to your example of the burial in the Isle of Skye, even though those two individuals were not genetically related, we don't actually know what their fictional kin relationships may have been during their lifetime. And that's something that genetic information cannot tell us.
00:29:05
Speaker
So even if these individuals were culturally considered to be related, maybe the child is adopted, or maybe the ideas of kinship that existed in that community were very different from the ones we have today, ancient DNA research is not going to solve that question for us. And so that's where, as you mentioned, all the other lines of evidence have to play a role as well, because we would also be doing a disservice if we only relied upon the genetic information to give us the full answer.
00:29:30
Speaker
And I also want to say that geneticists are not immune from also having our own biases and our own sort of understandings of the world projected onto the analysis that we do. And I think the way that you can see that most clearly is in how we compare and group populations for genetic analyses. So a lot of the analyses that we do rely on comparisons between populations
00:29:55
Speaker
Sometimes we compare ancient DNA to modern DNA, meaning we're comparing to living people, or we might be comparing ancient genomes from across different populations. And in order to do those types of analyses, we have to group
00:30:10
Speaker
people together into clusters, into populations. And in order to make those clusters, we often rely on labels that either come from archaeology or come from other forms of knowledge about the modern world. So let me give you an example. I might be doing a comparative analysis in which I'm looking at, let's say, present day British communities and present day Irish communities. Let's just say that I'm using those two labels. And those are modern day nation states.
00:30:40
Speaker
But whether those two nation states actually reflect the genetic lineages in those populations is not necessarily, they're not necessarily going to reflect the genetic diversity. And we know that humans, genetic diversity in humans is continuous, it's clinal, meaning that
00:30:56
Speaker
those labels that we like to put on nation states and continents and regions don't necessarily translate to stark differences in the genome. And so sometimes if we're not careful and we use labels kind of uncritically, we can also skew our analysis in this way.
00:31:11
Speaker
especially if we're trying to make inferences about the past. Because even though I'm comparing, let's say, an ancient genome from the Isle of Skye, like you mentioned, to a present-day British person and a present-day Irish person, in the past, their ancestors may not have been so easily divided. And so we have to consider that when we analyze our data. How do we take these labels that exist today and translate them into actually something that's meaningful in the past? And there's no easy answer to that.
00:31:39
Speaker
Yeah, it'd be nice if that was an easy answer, right? So from one difficult question with no answer to another, which potentially has an answer, though is highly debated, in archaeology we have
00:31:52
Speaker
ethical procedures and principles we have to adhere to. Obviously, when doing an ancient DNA study, you're using potentially human remains. That's one significant ethical consideration. Obviously, there are issues concerning how we apply labels, as you've mentioned, and also how we interpret and disseminate our results. I'm going to
00:32:19
Speaker
Basically, throw your way the big ethical question. What are the ethics as relating to ancient DNA studies?
00:32:29
Speaker
Yeah, there's a lot of ethical considerations that I think need to be mentioned. And I do think that our field as a whole is now grappling with
Interpreting DNA Findings
00:32:40
Speaker
this issue. It's one of the major debates currently that ancient DNA practitioners are engaged in. Well, I would say the first ethical consideration that we need to keep front and center is that ancient DNA research is inherently destructive.
00:32:53
Speaker
So just like an archaeological excavation destroys the site that you're working in, ancient DNA destroys a piece of a person. So we often have to sample teeth or bone. Sometimes you're sampling the only piece of bone that remains from this person or this organism. And once you destroy it, it's not going to come back, right?
00:33:15
Speaker
So you have to try to balance the need to minimize the destruction with the information that you're going to obtain from that element.
00:33:24
Speaker
But more than that, we also have to remember that these are the mortal remains of one's living people. And it's really a privilege that we have that we're able to engage with the remains of people. And oftentimes, people have living descendants. And the insights that we can obtain from ancient DNA research have an implication for living people. So other forms of archaeological evidence
00:33:49
Speaker
also have implications for living people, especially when we create narratives about the past that may impact those who descend from those communities. But Asia DNA, I would say, takes it to one level higher in terms of the caution we need to have because we live in
00:34:08
Speaker
what I would say, a culture that values genetic information very highly. So oftentimes people will say, well, it's in my genes, therefore it's determined, right? And so when we create narratives about the past and we say, oh, this is because we found it in the genome, then people tend to weigh that very highly, perhaps more so than other forms of knowledge.
00:34:31
Speaker
And this becomes problematic when ancient DNA data paints a picture of a community's past that may be in opposition or contrast with, for example, origin stories or folk tradition or scientific knowledge about that community that is generated through
00:34:50
Speaker
indigenous ways of knowing, right? And so how do we balance those two things? The best way to do that is to work with the communities that we're studying. So as scientists, I think that in general, science is having a re-examination moment of our practices and whether it's okay for us to walk into a museum and take a piece of a person or a piece of an artifact and then use it for destructive analysis without asking anybody about it.
00:35:19
Speaker
And so perhaps a better approach is to work with descendant communities who may know a lot more about that piece of tissue or artifact that you're simply who can contextualize your analysis much better and to ensure that you are respectful of their desires with respect to what research could be done and make sure that you are not harming communities, especially if you're working with historically marginalized communities,
00:35:47
Speaker
by inadvertently putting out findings that might lead to further marginalizing them. I'd say this is a massive issue in terms of most disciplines, certainly scientific disciplines, because even if we do, and this is still relatively rare in my experience, even if we do work with communities
00:36:15
Speaker
on the ground, so to speak. Our research outputs are inaccessible, often in the extreme, to these stakeholders to whom our findings would probably matter the most.
00:36:34
Speaker
There has been some amazing work done in this respect in the name of open access and open science. However, there is the argument as well that even if we manage to make our pure research outputs open access, that one, people often don't know how to find these research outputs, and two, often they're not
00:37:04
Speaker
easily digestible and this is an issue of accessibility.
00:37:10
Speaker
Yeah, and working with communities is not necessarily the fastest approach or the easiest approach to take. And it's going to vary depending on what region of the world you're working with, what is the local history of that area. So it requires the researcher to have some knowledge about the cultural and historical context of the place they're working in. Usually, it also requires, if you're not from that area,
00:37:37
Speaker
that you have relationships with local collaborators. Maybe those collaborators are archaeologists or cultural anthropologists. If your collaborators are also community members, that's even better because often you can get a lot more insight into the reasons why communities may or may not want to participate in research.
00:37:57
Speaker
It also requires meeting with people and having some humility about what are the research questions that I want to address versus what communities want to address. Oftentimes, communities are much more likely to want to participate in research if they see it as something that is going to benefit them in a positive way. When I say benefit, I don't necessarily mean financially, although that can also be a factor.
00:38:23
Speaker
Many communities want to know more about their past, but they want that knowledge to come in a respectful manner. We have lots of examples of genetic research not being deployed properly, not obtaining proper consent from people, or DNA samples that were collected for a purpose than being repurposed for something else.
00:38:45
Speaker
communities are well are well to be skeptical of genetic research when this has been the history of our field. So if we want to change that perspective, then we have to do the work. Right. That means maybe taking a little bit longer to start a project.
00:39:00
Speaker
But meeting with community members, it means considering what research questions to do, perhaps working together to craft some of those research questions, and then maintaining communities informed of the progress of the study throughout the time that you're working. So that it's not like I just took these samples and disappeared, and then they find out about it five years later when there's a press release. Because it's not even the actual paper, right? Often our papers are paywalled.
00:39:26
Speaker
It has to be a continuous process, and that's not necessarily the fastest way to go about it. But I think that there are a lot of benefits to going sort of that slower route, because at the end, you will have a project that is better contextualized, that is going to be beneficial, both to the scientists, but also to the communities that are most involved, and most importantly, will not do harm to those communities.
00:39:53
Speaker
More institutions should be willing to create pathways within their structures to enable these communities to enfranchise themselves, to eventually look forward to creating, designing these research projects themselves, and creating a trajectory which is in line with community interests.
00:40:20
Speaker
Yes, absolutely. So local capacity building is a huge part of equity in science. And this is something that I think is not unique to ancient DNA research. It's, I think, applicable to many areas of science because ideally what we want is to start changing the current structure of how we do research. Right now, we have an overrepresentation of scientists from
00:40:44
Speaker
global North countries working in every region of the world. And so what we want to do is to empower scientists and train scientists from the places that we work in so that someday you will be interviewing people. And if you want to ask, hey, I want to interview Puerto Rican scientists, there's 15 of them, right? And it's not just one person.
00:41:06
Speaker
And that's what we want. We want to have this diversity of perspectives in science. But that means that you, again, need to work to understand what do communities need and what do they want in terms of future capacity building. Because maybe I want to say, hey, I want you guys to train in all these methods in ancient DNA. And actually, the community is like, well,
00:41:26
Speaker
we would like to learn how to work with modern DNA samples because we think that would be the best way forward. And so again, it requires that conversation process. We've touched on this already, but there is a distinct danger and difference between what we can discover about a community in terms of their identity
00:41:53
Speaker
from material culture and from DNA. Forms and expressions of identity are relatively easy to infer from aspects of material culture because this is something which someone has made a decision to form and make and to own. However, DNA
00:42:19
Speaker
is not a choice, so in a literal sense it can show you your genetic identity I suppose.
00:42:27
Speaker
But that does not have to have anything to do with personal ideas concerning identity. And I think this is something which is problematic in terms of how we as scientists and as researchers in general present our data. There has to be a level of compassion in how we interpret what we're seeing because
00:42:54
Speaker
There have been instances where publication has had the effect of disagreeing with held beliefs from communities and has undermined personal ideas of identity.
00:43:09
Speaker
Yeah. So, you know, despite what commercial ancestry testing companies may want you to think in their ad campaigns, I don't think that DNA tells you anything about your identity. What, for example, when you do a DNA test, what that test is telling you is that you may share genetic variation with another person who is in a different population. And therefore we can infer that
00:43:36
Speaker
You might have an ancestral connection that you share with that person that is not tell you anything about who you are what your culture is it doesn't give you information about your ethnic identity about your racial identification now your identity and the results of that test might be.
00:43:54
Speaker
linked in the sense that perhaps your identity matches what you're seeing in that test in the sense that I think I am from Europe and it turns out that I have a lot of genetic ancestry that I share with other Europeans that would make sense based on my identity. But it doesn't necessarily have to match and that's okay because your identity and your genetic ancestry are two different things.
00:44:18
Speaker
And so we have to be really careful when we take genetic data and we apply them to archaeological record, not to fall into, I guess, that fallacy, right, that we're reconstructing the identity of ancient people. We are reconstructing their ancestries, their genetic variation. Some of that may tell us or hint a little bit at how these people saw themselves, but we cannot
00:44:41
Speaker
from those genetic data make a conclusion about their self-identification, at least not without other forms of evidence. And oftentimes I would argue that if you have descendant communities, those communities are going to be better positioned to say,
00:44:59
Speaker
anything about identity in the past, then we will be as by looking at the genome.
Genetic Lineage and Cultural Identity
00:45:05
Speaker
In that respect, researchers who deal with material cultural artifacts are perhaps better positioned to consider concepts of identity. I think it is a relatively modern phenomena which has linked genetic information and our DNA sequences to concepts of identity.
00:45:29
Speaker
Yeah, it's possible. I suppose ethnographers would also be able to provide some insight on that. And I should say a lot of human communities don't necessarily utilize genetic information as an arbiter of group membership, right?
00:45:44
Speaker
that may or may not be important for you to consider yourself part of a group because perhaps your group is linked together by other aspects like language or shared cultural practices and those things don't preserve in the genetic record. So while genetic information can point us in a direction, I don't think it
00:46:04
Speaker
should be considered like an arbiter and so that's why you know when i teach intro to human evolution which is the class that i teach often here at the university i always tell my students you know be cautious dna is not identity they can tell you some information about the past and your ancestors but it doesn't change who you are or who your family is
00:46:26
Speaker
And even in the case of people who are, for example, adopted or who have a family that they have chosen, that is still your family, right? Even if you also might have genetic relatives that you've discovered through testing, you have a family that is linked to you by your experiences and DNA doesn't change that. That is an extremely important point to make and I hope that that hits home with people and that
00:46:55
Speaker
You know, we talk about our research now studies, but identity is something which you can decide, and family and social connections is something that you can decide. And further too then, as someone that studies prehistory mainly, this is something which I have had many a discussion on, because obviously prehistory is something which is so far removed from our personal lived experiences,
00:47:25
Speaker
that we can't necessarily interpret these communities as being based on familial links or relation. This is something to be considered in that if you do pick up an archaeological textbook, you will find that there is a narrative of familial ties and links within certainly prehistoric communities.
00:47:54
Speaker
Although there is very little evidence to suggest that this was definitely the case. One of the many frustrations in archaeology.
00:48:08
Speaker
Now, I don't want to say that it's useless, right? We know that genetic testing can reveal kinship relationships that we didn't know existed in the past. One great example of that is the finding that modern humans and Neanderthals had instances of interbreeding and that many anatomically modern humans, such as us,
00:48:29
Speaker
Kerry, within our genomes, pieces of Neanderthal DNA, and now that's something that we would not have been able to infer from the paleontological record, because we don't have sites that are very clearly, oh, Neanderthal and human, right? We don't see that, and people debate a lot about whether different sites can be attributed to different hominins, and then ancient DNA was a key to allow us to see that event, that interbreeding event. We wouldn't have known it otherwise.
00:48:59
Speaker
But that's not necessarily the case in more recent periods when you have more material evidence or you might have oral histories or you might have historical documents where ancient DNA becomes one piece of many pieces of the puzzle to reconstruct that past. So do you think that there would be a benefit to more interdisciplinary studies and engagements in terms of ancient DNA and other subjects like archaeology?
00:49:28
Speaker
teams working together with multiple skill sets and developing research questions which are more interrogative and critical. Do you think that that would be particularly effective in terms of directing future research and getting the most from the patchwork quilt of evidence that we have?
00:49:53
Speaker
Yeah, I think that interdisciplinary teams are really necessary if we want to reconstruct the human past, especially if we want to ground that reconstruction in anthropological research. And there are some really good examples of that. There are big teams that include input from archaeologists and maybe an ethnographer and maybe a genetic anthropologist or an ancient DNA researcher. And you do tend to get much richer
00:50:21
Speaker
hypotheses about the lives and diversities of ancient people. We also see this, for example, in the study of ancient pathogens, right? So one of the very first ancient pathogen genomes that was published was the genome of Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that we now know caused the Black Death. And those early genomes were recovered from the remains of peoples who had died and were interred in mass grave sites that were known to have been open during the time of the plague.
00:50:51
Speaker
And so the fact that we knew that as a field, that historical and archaeological research had been performed is what enabled that sampling to occur. Because having that archaeological context, it was possible to conclude, oh, this pathogen that I've recovered, well, I didn't recover it, that the research is recovered.
00:51:12
Speaker
from the remains of these ancient people is linked to this mass epidemic event. And if that archeological research and historical research hadn't been there, then the pathogen would possibly still have been recovered, but they wouldn't have been able to contextualize those findings within everything else that we know. And now, for example, we know that Yersinia pestis during the Black Death didn't have
00:51:38
Speaker
as many genetic changes as we would have expected to see based on the mortality of the event compared to Yersinia pestis today. And so now people are turning to historical documents again to try to reconstruct, well, why did this pathogen cost so much mortality? And it's the analysis of historical documents and bioarchaeological evidence that is starting to answer that question.
00:52:02
Speaker
So it's by working together that we are able to now have a more nuanced vision of the impact of this major, major epidemic, pandemic actually, in people who live during that time period. In respect to that particular research, there are some incredibly nuanced interpretations coming out linked with climatological
Insights from Interdisciplinary Collaboration
00:52:23
Speaker
data, where they're looking at how extreme weather and
00:52:29
Speaker
Droughts, etc. could have really affected immune potential in populations, particularly when you consider aspects like consistent famine or drought as well in certain regions and certain countries. Apart from that, there's the entire discussion based on volcanic eruptions, which happened at the time as well, and how they affected in particular agriculture.
00:52:57
Speaker
but also systems of belief and even more of a fervent proliferation of Christianity. It is truly amazing what we can achieve when we work together, when we break down the boundaries that are imposed on our disciplines.
00:53:17
Speaker
Yeah, that's why I always say, you know, as much as I am an ancient DNA researcher, I don't think that genetics is, you know, the has the answer to everything. I think sometimes it can give us insights that we wouldn't have known otherwise. But other times, maybe the insights that you need are a combination or
00:53:35
Speaker
it can come from a different tool. And so, at least within archaeology, ancient DNA work is another piece of that 300-piece puzzle that you were mentioning earlier. In the same vein then, and awe and wonder at what we can achieve when we work interdisciplinary, what do you think some of the pivotal, brilliant discoveries are that have been made?
00:54:02
Speaker
in relation to ancient DNA. Those moments and events in research that make you go, really? We really managed to find that data, to understand that aspect
00:54:17
Speaker
It's a big question, I know, but hopefully it will help to inspire further research on behalf of our audience or maybe some future DNA specialists out there. Oh. Well, I think the sequencing of ancient hominins genomes has been pivotal for understanding of human evolution. So that includes the sequencing of Neanderthal genome as well as the Denisovan genome. So for all the young listeners who may not know,
00:54:46
Speaker
The Genese events were a group of hominins, meaning they were related to us. And they, well, we think they may have lived somewhere in Siberia, but that's only because the site where they were identified is in Siberia. They may have had a longer
00:55:02
Speaker
larger geographic range. And what's really important about that discovery is that it's the first hominin that has been identified only on the basis of genetic data. So we don't have a very good fossil record for this hominin. We only have fragmentary pieces of bone. And so by testing those fragmentary pieces, researchers were able to
00:55:27
Speaker
to conclude that these individuals were a separate species from Neanderthals and humans. Now, I hesitate when I say that because some paleoanthropologists might not like that term, a separate human form.
00:55:42
Speaker
And most interestingly than that, now we know that Neanderthals, humans, and Denisovans had multiple instances of interbreeding, and we can trace those by looking at ancient genomes as well as the genomes of modern people. So some of us carry within our genome fragments of genetic ancestry that derive from those interbreeding events. Now, what do those fragments mean for our diversity, for our health, for our
00:56:09
Speaker
phenotypic variation, that is where the field is now, investigating what is the impact of that ancient interbreeding. But we know at least that some of these DNA haplotypes, these pieces of DNA might be important in
00:56:25
Speaker
helping us become the globally distributed species that we are today. Because we see, for example, pieces of genes involved in our immune system regulation that came from Neanderthals are still present in the genomes of modern humans, meaning that perhaps they help us fight off infections that the Neanderthals also encountered. And so it's sort of blurring the picture of humans as being this
00:56:51
Speaker
this species has sort of evolved and took over the world and replaced everybody else, but instead what we're now seeing is that maybe the story of our species is much more interconnected with other human-like populations that were around at that time. So I would say that is a major, major discovery in ancient DNA, one of many. That is a brilliant example, actually, and one that I strangely didn't consider.
00:57:19
Speaker
When you think about it, that didn't just give us new information. It changed the way we thought about how we came to be as we are. It changed the entire discussion in terms of what was previously quite an isolationist view of human evolution. And I think discoveries and developments which changed the way we think are some of the most valuable. Because of that, we can move on to think about
00:57:48
Speaker
the entire situation in a new way and perhaps discover more variation and more relation between human species. Although like you I acknowledge that there are probably some anthropologists that aren't happy with that terminology. The discovery you mentioned has opened an entirely new door which leads to a new and exciting research trajectory.
00:58:16
Speaker
Yes, I think if I may, I will give an example from my own research. So I work primarily in the Caribbean islands. My research has focused on reconstructing the settlement of the Caribbean, so the variation of the first peoples who arrived on these islands, and then looking at the relationships between those communities and present day peoples.
00:58:39
Speaker
And inherently, that also means understanding the impact of colonialism in this region because the Caribbean was the first region to really experience the brunt of European colonialism. And so in my research, I looked at ancient DNA diversity of some of the first human communities in the island of Puerto Rico, which is the island that I am from.
00:59:00
Speaker
And I compare the diversity of these communities to modern genomes from modern Caribbean islanders as well as other peoples around the Americas. And one of the findings that we uncovered is that there is some genetic continuity between the pre-colonial populations of the island and present day communities.
00:59:22
Speaker
And that is very significant because a lot of what we understand about these ancient communities is sort of filtered through the colonial glasses, if you will, right? It's based on the writings of European colonizers. And that means that
00:59:39
Speaker
We often conceptualize these communities as kind of reduced versions of what they were because we're basing our interpretations on misrepresentations or fragmented pictures that colonizers left behind. And one of the consequences of that is that colonizers speak of a stark decline in
01:00:00
Speaker
the numbers of indigenous peoples that lived in the Caribbean soon after conquest efforts started. And now we know there was a large decline in population numbers that did occur, but that has led to an extinction narrative. The idea that these populations, they went extinct really quickly after contact and they therefore didn't contribute very much to the cultural and biological diversity of present day peoples.
01:00:25
Speaker
And that narrative has been countered by a lot of people, both on the islands in the Caribbean, as well as in the Caribbean diaspora, who have been saying for a very long time, we have cultural histories and oral histories of persistence and survival. And we think the picture is a bit more complicated than that.
01:00:44
Speaker
So when the ancient DNA research that we did demonstrated that there is a little bit of continuity, that finding forces us to reconsider our understanding of the fate of these communities. We don't necessarily need to throw away the historical documents because they do give us some information, but we can now expand our picture and start to ask broader questions. Well, these populations clearly did not go extinct. Their descendants are still here.
01:01:10
Speaker
And so how do we now take our understanding of that colonization period and start to expand it? What other questions can we address about these communities? Or maybe we need to revisit our understanding of those historical documents to understand what happened to them and how they dealt with those transformations that were brought by this moment.
01:01:27
Speaker
And so I bring up that example just to illustrate that ancient DNA can be very powerful in forcing us to revisit our understanding of the past and making us take a critical look perhaps at previous hypotheses that we had by having an additional source of information. That's really interesting because in archaeology there's sort of been a
01:01:49
Speaker
an equal reaction, but in a different way.
Addressing Colonial Influence in Research
01:01:53
Speaker
In terms of now, we are largely acknowledging the impact of colonial narratives on, for example, our museum collections as well as our research itself.
01:02:09
Speaker
There's been a move towards not embracing that, but acknowledging it and not trying to work around it, but largely just stating that that is an aspect, whether we want it to be or not, of our research. That it affects the interpretations we're able to give.
01:02:36
Speaker
Particularly in respect to museum collections, there has been a move towards creating exhibitions, for example, which bring out artefacts from British colonies and the accompanying explanations of these artefacts.
01:02:53
Speaker
deliberately include how colonial aspects have muddied the waters in terms of our ability and our right to interpret these artefacts, uses their significance
01:03:09
Speaker
et cetera. In respect to museums, they really have been at the forefront of a lot of the developments within archaeology, and I suspect it is because they are public-facing. We as researchers get to hide away a little bit from public scrutiny, which isn't right, but for museums, the public and their opinion, societal opinion, is directly there, and they have to respond to that.
01:03:35
Speaker
Another thing that they've been doing is looking at how research, archaeological research, ancient DNA research can be of use in terms of modern issues and problems that the world and society is facing. There is, for example, a Kiwi feather cloak in one of the museums local to where I am, and they have used ancient DNA techniques to extract
01:04:04
Speaker
DNA samples from that kiwi feather cloak, which are being used now to help inform on conservation strategies directly for that species. I just wondered how do you see ancient DNA research fitting into this trend for responsibility to modern issues and problems?
Engaging with Descendant Communities
01:04:28
Speaker
Yeah, that reminds me of research that often attempts to give voice to communities who have been historically voiceless. So, for example, there was a study published in, I believe, PNAS, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences recently, in which researchers worked in collaboration with an effort-descending community in the United States to study
01:04:55
Speaker
be the ancient DNA of the ancestors of that community that were buried in a graveyard. Now, because these are effort-descending communities, there is very little information in the historical record about these ancestors beyond the fact that they're enslaved. And that means that a lot of what we know about them, again, it's filtered through colonial tinted
01:05:14
Speaker
classes. And so by working in collaboration with these communities, researchers were able to reconstruct many different aspects of these ancestors lives because they did genetic testing. They looked at isotopes to look at
01:05:30
Speaker
you know, diet as well as places where people were growing. They were able to reconstruct some links to ancestral populations in Africa and other parts of the United States. And most importantly, they are able to fill in blanks in the history of these ancestors that the communities wanted to know about.
01:05:48
Speaker
And so that grounds communities to this place where their ancestors have been for a very long time. Even if there is a history of displacement there, now these communities have been there for 200, 300 years. And so using these methods, they're able to
01:06:05
Speaker
engage in route seeking, meaning thinking about the use of this land and their connections to this land and the connections to these ancestors that perhaps wouldn't have been evident from the study of historical documents alone. So ancient DNA is doing good work for modern communities, but there are some issues as well. So what would you describe some of those issues as being?
Global Inclusivity in DNA Research
01:06:32
Speaker
in terms of relating ancient DNA studies or DNA studies in general to modern communities and populations. What are some of your methodological woes?
01:06:44
Speaker
Yeah, well, one limitation or one challenge is that ancient DNA inference and analysis is always going to depend on the populations that you have to compare your data to. And so if there are skews in our reference data sets, those skews will be represented in our analyses. So right now, the human genetics
01:07:06
Speaker
community of researchers as a field is dealing with the problem that we have an overrepresentation of European and European-descended populations in our genetic databases.
01:07:17
Speaker
That means that my analyses are going to have higher resolution if I'm looking at the population history of places like Europe or Australia, if I'm only looking at European-descended communities there. Then if I were to look, for example, at the population history of the Caribbean or the population history of sub-Saharan Africa, I would have less resolution because I have less people from those areas to compare my ancient genomes to.
01:07:42
Speaker
And so that's a big problem because that means that we're basing our inferences about human evolution, human histories, the genetic diversity that influences people's health and culture today on a very small sample of the human population.
01:08:00
Speaker
And so there are active efforts to remedy this now, right, to sample human communities from all over the world. But again, also we see that it's kind of slow going because there's a lot of reasons why people from the Global South, for instance, have not been included in research and why most researchers are not from those areas.
01:08:22
Speaker
We have to remedy these equity issues if we want our field to be equitable. We need to open the path for people to become archaeologists and ancient DNA researchers and geneticists from all over the world if we really want our genomic databases to represent people from all over the world.
01:08:41
Speaker
Okay, so we are running up to time now. I am going to ask a couple more questions and then I'm going to say a very big thank you to you for doing this, for explaining in such a clear way what ancient DNA research means. So the first question I'm going to ask is if you could see any change occur in your field of research in, let's say, the next decade.
01:09:11
Speaker
What would you want it to be? It can be a discovery, a development in the way that ancient DNA is undertaken. What would be your wish? That's a tough one because I can think of like five things. I would like to see ancient DNA research move from
01:09:39
Speaker
centralized places, mostly in the Global North, where we do this work, to having lots of local laboratories that can work together. So if I'm doing an ancient DNA study in, let's say, Peru, there are colleagues in Peru that I can work with, and we can together create a more integrated reconstruction of the past.
01:10:02
Speaker
I, for example, primarily work in Puerto Rico, and I actually do also work in Peru. When I was a student in Puerto Rico, I knew that I had to leave my island in order to pursue graduate studies because there was no opportunity for me to do that. And that's a barrier to training. And I would like to see that over time,
01:10:24
Speaker
maybe by the time that I retire, I've helped to break down some of those barriers and so that there's a lot more people that look like me in this field and that's only going to enrich it. The reason why we looked at the connections between ancient Caribbean people and present day Caribbean people is because this was a question that was circulating around me when I was a student because I lived there. It's not to say that other scientists couldn't study it,
01:10:53
Speaker
it might not have been a question that they were aware of because they didn't live on the island at the time. And so when we create opportunities for people to enter our field with diverse ways of thinking, we're only going to get a better field. And so I wish we could see that in the next, you know, 15 to 20 years and maybe faster than that.
01:11:12
Speaker
Okay, goodness, yes, I would love that to happen in archaeology as well if I am completely honest. I think that is something which most research areas and disciplines could benefit from. We are far too centralised in our little research hubs.
01:11:32
Speaker
which aren't accessible as they should be. So yes, I think I will join you in that wish and maybe combined wishing from everyone will make it happen. So another question which I wanted to ask you is, where would you suggest someone start?
01:11:50
Speaker
If someone really wanted to become the next you, where should they start doing their reading, their research, their interest building? If someone is interested in becoming an ancient DNA researcher, there are many paths you can go through. Most ancient DNA researchers study archaeology or anthropology, or they study genetics.
01:12:18
Speaker
And then they integrate those three fields into graduate work. So I have undergraduate students right now here at the University of Minnesota who are interested in this field. And so they take classes in the archaeology of the regions that they're interested in. They take basic biology courses. They might take human genetics courses, maybe a little bit of chemistry. And then they will move on to graduate courses
01:12:44
Speaker
perhaps in a PhD program or a master's program in which they will also explore things like human astiology, especially if you're planning on working with humans. If you're planning on working with animals, then you might need to take zoarchaeology. You might take genomics generally, genomics of different organisms.
01:13:03
Speaker
And eventually, as you move on in the field, it's also necessary to understand computational methods. So how do you take genomic data and then derive meaning from it through the use of volume informatic methods? That's a major toolkit that you need to train in in order to become an ancient DNA scientist.
Public Engagement and Accessibility
01:13:24
Speaker
Okay, so Flipside really, really, really cares about developing a beneficial, good, effective research culture. But apart from that, also engaging the general public with what we as researchers do.
01:13:43
Speaker
This little segment here is an opportunity for you to highlight and basically shout about the good bits of research that you've heard about, things that your colleagues are doing, events that are being run, workshops, papers which are about to be published, books that are about to be published, anything really, projects which you care about.
01:14:09
Speaker
Here's your chance to let as many people as possible know about that and, you know, just spread some appreciation for the work that goes into doing research. Yeah. So in my laboratory here at the University of Minnesota, we have several research projects that are ongoing. So we are working in collaboration with an Afro Peruvian community in coastal Peru to apply archaeology and ancient DNA to
01:14:38
Speaker
reconstruct the lives of their ancestors.
Virtual Museum Project with Afro-Peruvian Communities
01:14:40
Speaker
The community that we're working with has a virtual museum and it's called Muafros San Luis, so that's M-U-A-F-R-O-S-A-N
01:14:55
Speaker
And if anyone visits the virtual museum, they can see all of the wonderful efforts that our community partners are doing to reconstruct the lives of their ancestors beyond their conditions of enslavement. So this means exploring historical documents, exploring biological evidence, facial reconstructions. And we hope that eventually we will be able to contribute the insights of ancient DNA to this museum as well, because that will allow us to understand
01:15:20
Speaker
where the individuals that we're studying came from, how they were connected to each other, and how they were transformed over time into the descendant community that we're working with today. So that's a really interesting virtual museum that I can recommend. And we also have other ongoing projects. We're working in collaboration with Caribbean archaeologists to continue our work, looking into the original settlement of the island of Puerto Rico, as well as other islands in the Caribbean.
01:15:48
Speaker
And one effort that we are working with or working towards as part of this work is also building local capacity for research on the island. So last summer, we held the first workshop for molecular anthropology for undergraduates in Puerto Rico. And next summer, we hope to hold a second edition of that. And the idea is to train students in some of the laboratory and analytical methods that they might need if they want to pursue future
01:16:18
Speaker
careers in genomics. And so I'm particularly excited about that. I think it's going to be a good pathway for students, even if they don't want to be ancient DNA researchers, even if they just want to study genetics or they want to go to medical school or other fields. I'm really excited to be able to go home every summer and help train other people to do some of what I do.
01:16:43
Speaker
Okay then, those are some amazing projects you mentioned and if you want more details about those, they are detailed in the show notes because I think you should all check them out. Right, so
01:16:58
Speaker
Last question, are there any colleagues that you want to shout out? Their work, just what they do, etc? Because if we all pay appreciation forward a bit, then people can all benefit from it.
01:17:16
Speaker
Yeah, I think I would like to shout out the work of several colleagues. So my colleague, Jada Bentores, also does genomics and ancient research in the Caribbean and has done wonderful work looking at how genomics can also function as in
01:17:33
Speaker
anti-racist tool, how it can help us break down preconceptions and stereotypes about human variation when we contextualize the analyses with what communities want to know. So I highly recommend people look at her work.
01:17:50
Speaker
I also think that my colleague Raquel Flusks, who is the author of the study I mentioned that was published in PNAS, her work is really good research that is also community engaged and community informed.
01:18:05
Speaker
I think she's going places. And if people want to know more about anthropological genetics research, a really good resource is the American Anthropological Genetics Association. So the acronym is AAAG, and there people might find a directory of other anthropological geneticists who are doing really great work looking at aspects of population history, health, and archaeology.
01:18:30
Speaker
Yep. It's always a philosophy on this podcast to shout out about the brilliant work that colleagues are doing. So thanks for that. And I will again put their names in the show notes so that you can check up on their amazing research. Yes. Yes. I think I would also like to shout out to my students because they are the next generation and, um,
01:18:58
Speaker
I think they're emerging professionals in this field. And so as we move on, I hope that someday they will be speaking to you instead of me. Yes. So hopefully by that stage, we will have multiple
01:19:12
Speaker
regional centers of ancient DNA science and archaeological science as well. So hopefully our wish and vision for the future will have come to pass and we'll have to do a bit of a review episode. Okay, so that is the end of the podcast. But I really felt I needed to include this next bit because I think it's a really important and brilliant message from Dr. Nieves Colon, who we were
01:19:41
Speaker
I'm delighted to have speak to us today on the podcast. You know, this is a field that is a relatively young field, but I already see the change in as more people from communities that were previously excluded from doing science are entering the field. We're definitely seeing a change for the better. We're seeing more exciting questions, more diverse approaches, more community engaged work. And so I think there's space for a lot more growth in this field.
01:20:10
Speaker
If you think you can't be an ancient DNA researcher, because nobody in this field looks like you, think again, we are changing that. So don't feel afraid to reach out.
01:20:20
Speaker
I don't think there's any better contribution I can make in summing up this episode than that, so I'm not going to try. Instead, I will simply say thank you for listening to this episode of Flipside. I hope you find it as enjoyable to listen to as I did to engage with it. You can find this podcast every month on APN and all other major streaming platforms.
01:20:46
Speaker
Thank you so, so much to Dr. Niev Kulan and thank you to you as well, our dear listeners. So, without further ado, see you on the flip side, guys.
01:21:17
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Cultural Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.