"The Taínos were the first Native Americans to meet European explorers in the Caribbean — and they soon fell victim to the diseases and violence brought by the outsiders. Today, the genomes of most if not all descendents of Taínos now contain few of the unique markers that characterized their ancestors.

But the genetic footprints of these ancestors are scattered throughout the genomes of modern Puerto Ricans, according to geneticist Carlos Bustamante at the Stanford University School of Medicine in Stanford, California. On average, the genomes of Puerto Ricans contain 10–15% Native American DNA, which is largely Taíno, says Bustamante.

At a presentation at the 12th International Congress of Human Genetics in Montreal, Canada, Bustamante described preliminary results from a study that aims to reconstruct the genetic features of the Taíno people. The cryptic information was found in the genomes of 70 modern Puerto Ricans, some of the latest additions to the ongoing 1000 Genomes project, an international consortium whose goal is to find the variations in DNA sequence among the genomes of all human populations."

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Rebuilding the genome of a hidden ethnicity (Nature 10/17)