Return to Country: genomics and the repatriation of ancient Aboriginal Australians
Author(s)
University, Griffith
Griffith University Author(s)
Year published
2018
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Indigenous people worldwide continue to struggle to repatriate the remains of their ancestors held by national and international organisations. After European settlement of Australia in 1788, Aboriginal Australian remains were deposited in museums worldwide. Many of these remains have no known provenance, making their return to Indigenous custodians difficult. Hence, we sequenced ten nuclear genomes and 27 mitogenomes from ancient pre-European Aboriginal Australians (up to 1,540 yr BP) and compared them to 100 high-coverage contemporary Aboriginal Australian genomes from 12 geographic locations. We report substantial ancient ...
View more >Indigenous people worldwide continue to struggle to repatriate the remains of their ancestors held by national and international organisations. After European settlement of Australia in 1788, Aboriginal Australian remains were deposited in museums worldwide. Many of these remains have no known provenance, making their return to Indigenous custodians difficult. Hence, we sequenced ten nuclear genomes and 27 mitogenomes from ancient pre-European Aboriginal Australians (up to 1,540 yr BP) and compared them to 100 high-coverage contemporary Aboriginal Australian genomes from 12 geographic locations. We report substantial ancient genetic structure showing strong affinities between ancient and contemporary individuals from the same geographic locations. Our findings demonstrate the feasibility of identifying the origins of unprovenanced ancestral remains using nuclear DNA, thereby enabling their return to their rightful communities.
View less >
View more >Indigenous people worldwide continue to struggle to repatriate the remains of their ancestors held by national and international organisations. After European settlement of Australia in 1788, Aboriginal Australian remains were deposited in museums worldwide. Many of these remains have no known provenance, making their return to Indigenous custodians difficult. Hence, we sequenced ten nuclear genomes and 27 mitogenomes from ancient pre-European Aboriginal Australians (up to 1,540 yr BP) and compared them to 100 high-coverage contemporary Aboriginal Australian genomes from 12 geographic locations. We report substantial ancient genetic structure showing strong affinities between ancient and contemporary individuals from the same geographic locations. Our findings demonstrate the feasibility of identifying the origins of unprovenanced ancestral remains using nuclear DNA, thereby enabling their return to their rightful communities.
View less >
Publisher URI
Funder(s)
ARC
Grant identifier(s)
DP140101405
DP110102635
LP120200144
LP140100387
LP130100748
Copyright Statement
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Item Access Status
Mediated access. Requests via the form in Data Link.
Note
This work was supported by the Australian Research Council (DP140101405, DP110102635, LP120200144, LP140100387, and LP130100748). J.L.W. was supported by the Australian Government, the Environmental Futures Research Institute, and the Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution with a PhD scholarship. A.-S.M. is supported by the European Research Council (starting grant 679330) and the Swiss National Science Foundation.
Q0008
Q0139
Subject
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander History
Genome
History