DNA Analysis, and Computation of Pre-Contact Population Size in the Caribbean

choi

(1) David Reich, and Orlando Patterson, DNA Rewrites the Telling of the Caribbean's Past; New research reveals surprising findings about the region. New York Times, Dec 28, 2020 (op-ed).
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/ ... bbean-genocide.html
https://news24x7world.com/analys ... bout-the-caribbean/
("When the Reich team applied this method to 91 ancient individuals for whom it had sequenced enough of the genome to carry out this analysis, it found 19 pairs of DNA cousins living on different large islands or island groups in the Caribbean [but these 'DNA cousins' might live in different times, because DNA can only say they are related, by how much, but can not tell time. Only the surroundings and carbon dating of skeleton can tell time] * * * The rate of close relationships that the Reich team found is what would be expected for about 3,000 people — at most 8,000 people — in their childbearing years [no explanation about 'childbearing years] in Hispaniola. The true numbers of people could have been threefold to tenfold larger because at any given time only a fraction of a population is in its childbearing years. Still, we can confidently conclude that the pre-contact population size of Hispaniola was no more than a few tens of thousands of people. * * * According to a 1540 census, the number of Indigenous people in Hispaniola had dropped to 250 people. It dropped to zero in later counts. [This would contradict the following sentence (how to explain it? One way is Indigenous people were unwilling to identify themselves in various censuses] * * *  the genetic legacy of pre-contact Caribbean people did not disappear: They contributed an estimated 14 percent of the DNA of living people from Puerto Rico, 6 percent of that in the Dominican Republic and 4 percent of that in Cuba")

Note:
(a) Christopher Columbus's first landfall on Oct 12, 1992 was at The Bahamas. His brother Bartholomew was 10 years younger.  
(b) Hispaniola
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hispaniola  
(section 1 History, section 1.1 Etymology: La Isla Española)

Spanish-English dictionary:
* español (adj; feminine: española): "Spanish"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/español
(c) Antilles
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antilles
("The Antilles * * * is an archipelago * * * divided into" Greater Antilles and Lesser Antilles; section 1 Background: name)

(2) Fernandes DM, Sirak Kendra A (co-first author) * * * Reich D (last author), A Genetic History of the Pre-Contact Caribbean. Nature _: _ (Dec 23, 2020)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-03053-2
(Abstract only)
https://www.researchgate.net/pub ... e-contact_Caribbean

My comment: Read abstract only, which will be explained in (3).

(3) Natalie van Hoose, Ancient DNA Retells Story of Caribbean's First People. Florida Museum of Natural History, University of Florida, Dec 23, 2020
https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.ed ... beans-first-people/
("Harald Ringbauer, a postdoctoral fellow in the Reich Lab * * * Ringbauer's technique showed about 10,000 to 50,000 people were living on two of the Caribbean's largest islands, Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, shortly before European arrival. This falls far short of the million inhabitants Columbus described to his patrons, likely to impress them")

My comment:
(a) Please view anime (short for animation) first before reading the text.
(b) Florida Museum of Natural History
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_Museum_of_Natural_History
(Gainesville, Florida)
(c) The text did not explain how Reich developed population size from his DNA analysis, so there is no way for an outsider like me to assess credibility of his research.