Lost Argentine civilisation 'no one knew existed' discovered in region termed 'blank spot on the map'

A civilisation that lived in Argentina for at least 8,000 years has only now been discovered, thousands of years after it was wiped off the face of Earth. How it managed to evade detection for all these years boils down to its way of life. This group of early humans did not mingle with anyone and lived largely in isolation. This meant that despite environmental and cultural changes, its genetic identity remained unchanged. According to a study published in the journal Nature, this lineage was unique to central Argentina, and the roots of Indigenous people in the country can be traced back to this civilisation. Javier Maravall López, a Harvard University evolutionary biologist and lead author of the study, said this marks the discovery of a "major episode of the history of the continent that we just weren’t aware of."

Scientists say that even though humans spread out from Africa to the southernmost part of South America roughly 14,000 years ago, knowledge about the inhabitants of the latter has remained limited. David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School and senior author of the paper, calls this part of the world "a blank spot on the map."

Also Read: Indian scientists stumble upon 37,000-year-old bamboo stem with strange marks in Manipur. It changes things for Asia

Scientists created and compared a DNA dataset

To learn more about the people who lived, the team analysed bones and teeth of 238 ancient individuals found across Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. Some of them were as old as 10,000 years, and helped build the largest ancient DNA dataset ever assembled from this region. This was compared with DNA from 588 other ancient individuals across the Americas, spanning 12,000 years. They found that by around 8,500 years ago, a genetically distinct population had emerged in what is now central Argentina.

“We found this new lineage, a new group of people we didn’t know about before, that has persisted as the main ancestry component for at least the last 8,000 years up to the present day,” said Maravall López. They were different from those who lived in the Andes and from those in Brazil’s tropical forests. This ancient Argentine lineage also had limited interaction with others nearby, and only around 3,300 years ago started mingling with the Pampas to the south. They married their close kin as extended families formed tight-knit economic and political units.