In a new study of the genetic history of the pre-contact Caribbean, researchers analyzed genome-wide DNA data from 174 ancient individuals who lived in the Bahamas, Haiti and the Dominican Republic (collectively, Hispaniola), Puerto Rico, Curaçao and Venezuela, as well as the data from 89 previously sequenced ancient individuals.
Illustration of one of the early settlers in the Caribbean. Image credit: Tom Björklund.
Prior to European colonization, the Caribbean was a mosaic of distinct communities that were connected by networks of interaction since the first human occupations in Cuba, Hispaniola and Puerto Rico around 6,000 years ago.
The pre-contact Caribbean is divided into three archaeological ages, which denote shifts in material cultural complexes.
Tessa K.J. Haining ’23 lives in Adams House. Her column appears on alternate Fridays.
Vladimir Nabokov was a lepidopterist a scientist of butterflies.
His American literary career started close to Boston in 1941, at the helm of Wellesley College’s Russian department. At the same time, he was the curator of the butterfly collection at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. You can see Nabokov’s fastidious devotion to the Museum’s vast and varied collection in his anatomical drawings, his published entomology papers on different elements of taxonomy, and of course his books. Take “Pale Fire,” his 1962 poem-as-novel bursting with butterfly as theme: “I can do what only a true artist can do pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation … see the web of the world, and the warp and the weft of that web.”