Origins of an Unmarked Georgia Cemetery Using Ancient DNA Analysis

Determining the origins of those buried within undocumented cemeteries is of incredible importance to historical archaeologists and in many cases, the nearby communities. In the case of Avondale Burial Place, a cemetery in Bibb County, Georgia, in use from 1820 to 1950, all written documentation of those interred within it has been lost. Osteological and archaeological evidence alone could not describe, with confidence, the ancestral origins of the 101 individuals buried there. In the present study, we utilize ancient DNA extraction methods to investigate the origins of Avondale Burial Place through the use of well-preserved skeletal fragments from 20 individuals buried in the cemetery. Through examination of hypervariable region I in the mitochondrial genome (HVR1, mtDNA), we determine haplotypes for all 20 of these individuals. A total of 18 of the 20 individuals belong to the L or U haplogroups, suggesting that Avondale Burial Place was most likely used primarily as a resting place for African Americans. After the surrounding Bibb County community expressed interest in investigating potential ancestral relationships to those within the cemetery, a total of eight potential descendants provided saliva in order to obtain mtDNA HVR1 information. This phase of the study revealed that two different individuals from Avondale Burial Place matched two individuals with oral history ties to the cemetery. Using the online tool EMPOP, we calculated the likelihood of these exact matches occurring by chance alone

Phylotyping and Functional Analysis of Two Ancient Human Microbiomes

Background: The Human Microbiome Project (HMP) is one of the U.S. National Institutes of Health Roadmap for Medical Research. Primary interests of the HMP include the distinctiveness of different gut microbiomes, the factors influencing microbiome diversity, and the functional redundancies of the members of human microbiotas. In this present work, we contribute to these interests by characterizing two extinct human microbiotas. Methodology/Principal Findings: We examine two paleofecal samples originating from cave deposits in Durango Mexico and dating to approximately 1300 years ago. Contamination control is a serious issue in ancient DNA research; we use a novel approach to control contamination. After we determined that each sample originated from a different human, we generated 45 thousand shotgun DNA sequencing reads. The phylotyping and functional analysis of these reads reveals a signature consistent with the modern gut ecology. Interestingly, inter-individual variability for phenotypes but not functional pathways was observed. The two ancient samples have more similar functional profiles to each other than to a recently published profile for modern humans. This similarity could not be explained by a chance sampling of the databases. Conclusions/Significance: We conduct a phylotyping and functional analysis of ancient human microbiomes, while providing novel methods to control for DNA contamination and novel hypotheses about past microbiome biogeography. We postulate that natural selection has more of an influence on microbiome functional profiles than it does on the species represented in the microbial ecology. We propose that human microbiomes were more geographically structured during pre-Columbian times than today

Sistema constructivo IRA 3

El Sistema IRA comprende un proyecto de sistemas constructivos de semiprefabricación liviana y la confección de proyectos de edificios tipificados para albergues, escuelas, talleres artesanales, puestos sanitarios, salas de pasajeros, viviendas y gimnasios. Se muestra aquí el manual y el cuadernillo de ejecución para el Sistema IRA 3 (grupo de proyecto para zonas de nieve).Material digitalizado en SEDICI gracias al Centro Interdisciplinario de Estudios Complejos, al colectivo Agite y al Archivo Fermín.Centro Interdisciplinario de Estudios Complejo

Sistema constructivo IRA 1

El Sistema IRA comprende un proyecto de sistemas constructivos de semiprefabricación liviana y la confección de proyectos de edificios tipificados para albergues, escuelas, talleres artesanales, puestos sanitarios, salas de pasajeros, viviendas y gimnasios. Se muestra aquí el manual y el cuadernillo de ejecución para el Sistema IRA 1 (grupo de proyecto de urgencia).Material digitalizado en SEDICI gracias al Centro Interdisciplinario de Estudios Complejos, al colectivo Agite y al Archivo Fermín.Centro Interdisciplinario de Estudios Complejo

Sistema constructivo IRA 1

El Sistema IRA comprende un proyecto de sistemas constructivos de semiprefabricación liviana y la confección de proyectos de edificios tipificados para albergues, escuelas, talleres artesanales, puestos sanitarios, salas de pasajeros, viviendas y gimnasios. Se muestra aquí el manual y el cuadernillo de ejecución para el Sistema IRA 1 (grupo de proyecto de urgencia).Material digitalizado en SEDICI gracias al Centro Interdisciplinario de Estudios Complejos, al colectivo Agite y al Archivo Fermín.Centro Interdisciplinario de Estudios Complejo

Sistema constructivo IRA 1

El Sistema IRA comprende un proyecto de sistemas constructivos de semiprefabricación liviana y la confección de proyectos de edificios tipificados para albergues, escuelas, talleres artesanales, puestos sanitarios, salas de pasajeros, viviendas y gimnasios. Se muestra aquí el manual y el cuadernillo de ejecución para el Sistema IRA 1 (grupo de proyecto de urgencia).Material digitalizado en SEDICI gracias al Centro Interdisciplinario de Estudios Complejos, al colectivo Agite y al Archivo Fermín.Centro Interdisciplinario de Estudios Complejo

Possible Positive Selection for an Arsenic-Protective Haplotype in Humans

Background: Arsenic in drinking water causes severe health effects. Indigenous people in the South American Andes have likely lived with arsenic-contaminated drinking water for thousands of years. Inhabitants of San Antonio de los Cobres (SAC) in the Argentinean highlands generally carry an AS3MT (the major arsenic-metabolizing gene) haplotype associated with reduced health risks due to rapid arsenic excretion and lower urinary fraction of the monomethylated metabolite. Objectives: We hypothesized an adaptation to high-arsenic living conditions via a possible positive selection for protective AS3MT variants and compared AS3MT haplotype frequencies among different indigenous groups. Methods: Indigenous groups we evaluated were a) inhabitants of SAC and villages near Salta in northern Argentina (n = 346), b) three Native American populations from the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP; n = 25), and c) five Peruvian populations (n = 97). The last two groups have presumably lower historical exposure to arsenic. Results: We found a significantly higher frequency of the protective AS3MT haplotype in the SAC population (68.7%) compared with the HGDP (14.3%, p < 0.001, Fisher exact test) and Peruvian (50.5%, p < 0.001) populations. Genome-wide microsatellite (n = 671) analysis showed no detectable level of population structure between SAC and Peruvian populations (measure of population differentiation F(ST) = 0.006) and low levels of structure between SAC and HGDP populations (F(ST) < 0.055 for all pairs of populations compared). Conclusions: Because population stratification seems unlikely to explain the differences in AS3MT haplotype frequencies, our data raise the possibility that, during a few thousand years, natural selection for tolerance to the environmental stressor arsenic may have increased the frequency of protective variants of AS3MT. Further studies are needed to investigate this hypothesis

Population Genetic Structure of Traditional Populations in the Peruvian Central Andes and Implications for South American Population History

Molecular-based characterizations of Andean peoples are traditionally conducted in the service of elucidating continent-level evolutionary processes in South America. Consequently, genetic variation among “western” Andean populations is often represented in relation to variation among “eastern” Amazon and Orinoco River Basin populations. This west-east contrast in patterns of population genetic variation is typically attributed to large-scale phenomena, such as dual founder colonization events or difffering long-term microevolutionary histories. However, alternative explanations that consider the nature and causes of population genetic diversity within the Andean region remain underexplored. Here we examine population genetic diversity in the Peruvian Central Andes using data from the mtDNA first hypervariable region and Y-chromosome short tandem repeats among 17 newly sampled populations and 15 published samples. Using this geographically comprehensive data set, we first reassessed the currently accepted pattern of western versus eastern population genetic structure, which our results ultimately reject: mtDNA population diversities were lower, rather than higher, within Andean versus eastern populations, and only highland Y-chromosomes exhibited significantly higher within-population diversities compared with eastern groups. Multiple populations, including several highland samples, exhibited low genetic diversities for both genetic systems. Second, we explored whether the implementation of Inca state and Spanish colonial policies starting at about ad 1400 could have substantially restructured population genetic variation and consequently constitute a primary explanation for the extant pattern of population diversity in the Peruvian Central Andes. Our results suggest that Peruvian Central Andean population structure cannot be parsimoniously explained as the sole outcome of combined Inca and Spanish policies on the region’s population demography: highland populations difffered from coastal and lowland populations in mtDNA genetic structure only; highland groups also showed strong evidence of female-biased gene flow and/or efffective sizes relative to other Peruvian ecozones. Taken together, these findings indicate that population genetic structure in the Peruvian Central Andes is considerably more complex than previously reported and that characterizations of and explanations for genetic variation may be best pursued within more localized regions and defined time periods