Puerto Rican Studies Commons^™

Puerto Rican Haplogroup Distribution: A Taíno History, Paige Mackenzie Williams

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The extent to which Puerto Rico’s indigenous communities resisted, survived, and were transformed by colonization is unclear despite extensive ethnohistorical research. Historical claims of extinction are attributed to colonial census information but are strongly opposed by islanders who claim Indigenous Taíno ancestry (Nieves-Colón et al. 2019). Ethnic composition of Puerto Ricans is primarily European, African, and Indigenous and these compositions reflect migrations and admixture. Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is of vast importance, as it permits tracing of the maternal line through a common female ancestor. In this, investigation of Indigenous haplogroup frequencies and their importance and relevance in Puerto Rican genetic …