A University at Buffalo, New York, professor will talk about the genetic connection between human remains thousands of years old discovered in a cave near Wrangell and Alaska Natives in the area today.
The presentation, sponsored by the Wrangell Cooperative Association and the U.S. Forest Service, will be held at 7 p.m. Thursday, June 13, at the Nolan Center. The event will be free to the public.
Evolutionary biologist Charlotte Lindqvist of the university’s department of biological sciences is coming to Wrangell for the presentation. “I will talk about some of our DNA research of bones that have been discovered in caves in Southeast Alaska, including caves near Wrangell, particularly our findings from bones of a human and a dog found in the same cave,” she said in an email last week.
Lindqvist said she has been performing genetic analyses of bones found in caves in Southeast Alaska for more than a decade. According to a paper published last year in the journal iScience, of which she was the senior author with other collaborators (including WCA tribal administrator Esther Aaltséen Reese), recent genetic analysis of a bone fragment discovered about two decades earlier in Lawyer’s Cave near Wrangell revealed that it was from a humerus (upper arm bone) of a 3,000-year-old young woman.
The cave is on the mainland, across Blake Channel from Wrangell Island.
“Based on new technologies that were not available when the bones were originally found about 20 years ago, we found a genetic connection between the 3,000-year-old woman and the present-day Native peoples who live in the region today,” Lindqvist said.
“Very few prehistoric human remains have been discovered in Southeast Alaska, and our genetic findings provide a nice complement to the Tlingit oral stories about the origin of their ancestors and the human prehistory of Southeast Alaska,” she said.
According to the paper in the science journal, Forest Service archaeologists and Wrangell district staff worked closely with the WCA on the archaeological work at Lawyer’s Cave, which resulted in the repatriation of the human remains recovered from the cave. The WCA named the ancient individual analyzed in this study Tatóok yík yées sháawat (“Young lady in cave”).
Lindqvist said she will also include in her presentation the results from genetic testing of a 10,000-year-old dog bone fragment from the same cave where Tatóok yík yées sháawat was discovered, “and also our general work and current knowledge of the natural pre-history of the region based on new analyses.”
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