DNA from ancient teeth solves mystery of African slave burial

Researchers have analyzed the DNA of ancient teeth to identify the regional origin of three African slaves buried more than 300 years ago on a former Dutch colony in the Caribbean.

The development could open the door to broadening the understanding of African American ancestry linked to the European trade in slaves, which often is limited by scant historicalrecord keeping and incomplete genome and population data, according to the study, published online Monday in the journalProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"I like to think of DNA as another type of archive, another type of record that we can use in order to understand the past, said the study's lead author, Hannes Schroeder, an archaeologistwho studies ancient DNA at the Natural History Museum of Denmark.

When they were unearthed accidentally in 2010 during the construction of an office complex, the three skeletons in the Zoutsteeg area of Philipsburg, on the Dutch side of St. Martin, offered strong clues that they had not been born there. Paramount among them were front teeth that had been chipped and filed in patterns that were significant to African tribal cultures, a practice that was largely abandoned after enslavement, Schroeder said.

The dental patterns, however, were not enough to determine where the three likely came from in Africa.

The two men and one woman, ages 25 to 40, probably died between 1660 and 1680, when St. Martin was ruled by the French and Dutch. Althougharchives of the slave tradehave expanded greatly, they mention only one docking at St. Martin in the last half of the 17th century, and do not list even the port of embarkation, let alone the origin of the slaves themselves.

There is a lot of information in there, but when it comes to trying to pinpoint ethnic origins, there are no records telling you where a particular individual comes from, Schroeder said.

Since the publication five years ago of the first ancient genome, researchers have begun shifting focus to relatively recent DNA in areas where little data have been published, including Africa and the Americas.

Carlos Bustamante, a geneticist at Stanford University, has pioneered a method to extract workable DNA from highly damaged and contaminated samples, and has mapped out the overlay between geography and genome characteristics. A recently published Mexican genome study, for example, shows that mixed-heritage ormestizo DNA strongly reflects the population patterns of pre-conquest Mexico -- DNA, in a sense, maps out the structure of the pre-Colombian world.

Bustamante and Schroeder used a similar approach to isolate and sequence relatively short strands (67 base pairs) of DNA extracted from the dental roots of the Zoutsteeg Three. The researchers then compared sets of distinguishing characteristics from each individual's genome with those from 11 West African populations.

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DNA from ancient teeth solves mystery of African slave burial