Reinaldo José Lopes: One people, a thousand Amazonian stories – 03/25/2023 – Reinaldo José Lopes

In most people’s minds, the profound history of the Amazon, before the arrival of Europeans, is most likely imagined as an immense amazement. Few people, few changes and a forest that never ended would have been the keynote of the region over thousands of years. The DNA of a single Amazonian ethnic group, however, is enough to throw any remnants of that image to the ground.

Judging by what the data of a new study on the genome of the Ashaninka, a people that can be found both in villages in Acre and in various communities in the Peruvian Amazon, the real scenario was completely different. Contact with other very different ethnic groups, mobility on a continental scale and mixing between different peoples was the rule, not the exception, over thousands of years, reveals the research.

The work was recently published in the scientific journal Current Biology and was led by Marco Rosario Capodiferro, from the University of Pavia, in Italy. Researchers from other European countries and the USA also participated in the study, as well as a pair of scientists linked to Uerj (University of the State of Rio de Janeiro), Leonor Gusmão and Filipa Simão.

Among the Amazonian peoples, the Ashaninka stand out for their use of long cotton garments, the “kushmas”. The term comes from Quechua, the most spoken language in the ancient Inca Empire. Indeed, contact with the powerful civilizations of the Andes seems to have partly characterized the past of the Ashaninka, whose settlements functioned as a sort of intermediary between these empires and Amazonian groups further east, trading in the products of the forest —which included items coveted, like macaw feathers and jaguar skins—but also resisting the imperial advance.

It would be natural to assume, therefore, that ethnicity had considerable influences from the Andean peoples in its genetic composition, but the scenario revealed by the study is much more complicated. By analyzing the DNA of 51 Ashaninka from Peru, the team of scientists first discovered that they can be divided into at least two main subpopulations, with significantly different genomic profiles.

One of the subgroups, as expected, shows more links with the populations of the Andes and the Peruvian coast, on the Pacific coast. But the other has greater affinities with indigenous peoples from the Atlantic coast of South America, such as the ka’apor (who now live in Maranhão), and also with groups from the southernmost part of the continent, reaching as far as Argentina.

As a bonus, there are also indications of the Ashaninka’s kinship with the indigenous people who lived in the current Caribbean before the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1492. The most plausible conclusion, according to the scientists, is that the group’s genetic composition received contributions from the Atlantic coast and of the Southern Cone and, in turn, they or their close relatives contributed to the peopling of the Caribbean islands.

I emphasize again: it is a single ethnic group, among the hundreds or even thousands that existed before the European invasion. What impresses me is how data on these sagas are being produced by science at an ever-increasing pace in recent years, as I tell you in this space every now and then. Think of how many stories are still waiting to be told. The past will never be like it used to be.

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