Ancestral Andes Mystery Solved
Photograph by Eduardo Rubiano Moncada
New genetic research led by the Genographic Project team, including Fabricio R. Santos, Genographic project scientist, and Spencer Wells, explorer-in-residence and Genographic director, shows a distinctive ancestry for the Uros populations of Peru and Bolivia that predates the arrival of the Spanish conquistadores and may date back to the earliest settlement of the Altiplano of the central Andes some 3,700 years ago. Here, Wells surveys the landscape from aboard a boat on the Peruvian side of Lake Titicaca.
"The timing of human settlement in the Andean Altiplano is one of the great mysteries of our species' worldwide odyssey. A vast, high-altitude plain, the Altiplano seems utterly inhospitable, yet it has apparently nurtured a complex culture for millennia.
"This significant new study reflects the importance of the Genographic team's careful, patient work with the members of the indigenous communities living in this remote corner of the mountainous South American terrain, and sheds light on how our species has adapted to disparate ecosystems since its relatively recent exodus from an African homeland less than 70,000 years ago."
—Spencer Wells, explorer-in-residence and Genographic director
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