My Taíno Heritage and Its Roots in Deep Time
In which Teofilo continues his quest to untangle the rivers of people who converged in him, with special focus on the Taino People of Borikén, later, Puerto Rico, and on their more remote ancestors.
Origin Stories
Surging or called from the bare soil by a god or gods, or from a cave, are hallmarks of most stories detailing the origins of indigenous American peoples. The Taíno (tah-EEH-noh) People who once inhabited the Bahamas and the Greater Antilles including Puerto Rico were no exception. In his Relación Acerca de las Antigüedades de los Indios, Fray Ramón Pané, a friar of the Order of St. Jerome, tells us the name of not one, but two original, ancestral caves located in what is now the Dominican Republic: Cacibajagua (kah-cee-bah-HAH-uah) and Amayaúna (ah-mah-ya-OO-nah). Like many other indigenous oral traditions, the story is convoluted, adding little to no detail as to how the people came out from the caves in the first place, at least that I can tell. The lack of detail may bother us moderns, but it didn’t the Taíno storytellers, as the purpose of the story was to show they came from the land they inhabited. They belonged to the land and the land, to them in a relationship of mutual conception and birth. The land was their identity. I have observed this same purpose in the origin stories of other Native Americans who also claim to have a natural and even supernatural origins, and subsequent intimate and sacred connection, to their land.
Science, however, has another origin story for Native Americans. The more accepted opinion among scientists suggests that big-game hunters crossed the Bering Strait from North Asia (Siberia) into the Americas (Alaska) over a land bridge (Beringia), a consequence of lower sea levels due in turn to extensive glaciation in the northern hemisphere of our planet. This land bridge existed from 45,000 to 12,000 before the birth of Christ (See Figure 2).
From c. 16,500 – c. 13,500 BCE they migrated through ice-free corridors along the Pacific coast and valleys of North America, following animals through these southbound routes deeper into the continent. These Palaeo-Indians went on foot or used boats along the coastline. They moved southward very fast and by 10,000 years ago, Native populations were well-established, with hundreds of distinct languages, dialects, and cultures in what today is Mexico and South America.
According to recent research, the Taíno people themselves were the composite of several migration waves from northern South America’s Orinoco River Basin, starting 4,000 years ago with the Ortoiroid culture. The Ortoiroids were displaced by the Saladoid, a culture from the same South American region that arrived on the island between 430 and 250 BC. Then, by the 7th and 11th centuries A.D, the Arawak settled the island, giving the Taíno people their final morphology Columbus encountered during his discovery of the Island, called by the Taíno Borikén (boh-reeh-KEHN), on November 19th, 1493. At the time of European discovery there were at most 600,000 Taínos living in what the Spanish christened as the Island of San Juan Bautista, later, Puerto Rico.
Genetic History
I carry in my body genetic markers substantiating all the history I shared with you above. In fact, the reader can observe that my genome has commonalities with at least four ancient peoples, all connected to Native Americans (See Figure 3).
The first line denotes common genes I share with the people of the Altai Mountains of Siberia whom scientists suspect share a common origin with Native Americans. The genetic sample against which my own is compared to is 50,000 years old. What this means is that I’m related to this person who roamed Siberia 50,000 years ago.
The second line shows across-the-board commonalities with other Siberian people, as reflected in the so-called Ust'-Ishim Man, the name scientists gave to the 45,000-year-old remains of one of the early modern humans to inhabit western Siberia. That means 5,000 years after my Altai ancestors were foraging in Siberia, another ancestor from whom I either descend or share a common ancestor with, was alive and well in the same region 45,000 years ago. Consider that the oldest civilizations from the dawn of written history date from only 5,000 years ago, the same timespan it took from my ancestor to surge from the other Siberian peoples.
The third line documents the genetic commonalities I bear with the Clovis Culture of North America. The Clovis Culture is a prehistoric North American culture which scientists named for the distinct stone tools found near Clovis, New Mexico. The Clovis Culture appeared about 11,500–11,000 ago. What that means is that I had an ancestor hunting game in North America that long ago. The Clovis People are the direct ancestors of roughly 80% of all living Native American populations in North and South America, although there have been many archaeological finds throughout the Americas predating the Clovis culture, adding significant uncertainty to that claim (See Figure 4).
To end, the fourth line illustrates genetic commonalities of much more recent import, between my genome and that of Kennewick Man, the name generally given to the skeletal remains of a Paleo-Indian man found in Kennewick, Washington, in 1996. Scientists date the remains to 8,000 or 9,000 years ago. Since by that time ancestral populations already inhabited Mexico and South America who in turn gave rise to the peoples that formed the Taíno People much later, I consider Kennewick Man more like a cousin - someone with whom I share a common ancestry - than an ancestor himself.
My Heritage Lost in Time
What this all means is that, as far as my Native American, Taíno ancestry, pretty old blood runs through my veins. Though I too can trace European ancestors that far back even to Neanderthal hominids with the same Archaic DNA mapping I used to determine the origins in deep time of my Native American ancestors, I’d wanted to make the point that my roots in the Americas run long and deep. It is a fact that I’m a cousin to the 80 percent of Native Americans from North, Central, and South America who descend from the Clovis culture and through them, to the cultures of West Asia and Siberia.
The Taíno people don’t survive as a living, traditional culture in the same way Native Americans from the entire continent survive. As I’ve explained elsewhere, I don’t consider myself a Taíno Native American and look with great skepticism at any such claim by anyone to that effect. Nevertheless, the Taínos left a profound mark on the physiognomy of most Puerto Ricans, as well as in our language and folk beliefs. In fact, my Taíno ancestors may well have played their ballgames called batey (bah-TEH-y) and danced their areytos (ah-REHY-tohs) in a ceremonial center located in a rural ward of my native Ponce: the Centro Ceremonial Indígena de Tibes. The ball fields unearthed therein date to A.D. 25, meaning that Our Lord Jesus Christ was 25 when my Taíno ancestors were playing ball in an area that would become, much later, my native town (See Figure 5). (Of course, Our Lord was walking at the time with my Jewish ancestors, as I explained before).
I carry their inheritance, flowing from both my parents, with great pride; I honor their sacrifice, and their unconditional love for our Island country. I’m proud to carry their deep millennial heritage, their sufferings and sacrifices deep within me and through me, a heritage I’ve passed down to my children, grandchildren, and my descendants of another distant future, God willing.