Sunday, September 24, 2023

AAAS: Americas’ first cowboys were enslaved Africans, ancient cow DNA suggests. Really!

Here once again the previously prestigious American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is disseminating junk journalism! It is disturbing!

This article is highly speculative and misleading! How do you get from cow bone DNA to black cowboys in the Caribbean? The United States is also willfully commingled with Latin America and the Caribbeans. Not to mention that this article roughly refers to the 16th century while the U.S. did not exist before 1776 and so on.

Apparently, the two guys that were interviewed for this article, i.e. "Nicolas Delsol, an archaeozoologist at the Florida Museum of Natural History" and "Louisiana State University geographer Andrew Sluyter", are highly biased.

"... But the first cowboys lived in Mexico and the Caribbean, and most of them were Black.

That’s the conclusion of a recent analysis of DNA from 400-year-old cow bones excavated on the island of Hispaniola and at sites in Mexico. The work, published in Scientific Reports, also provides evidence that African cattle made it to the Americas at least a century earlier than historians realized.
The timing of these African imports—to the early 1600ssuggests the growth of cattle herds may have been connected to the slave trade ...
Modern American cattle are a mix of European and African breeds, researchers thought the African contribution came via Spain, or from cattle imported in the 19th century. ..."

From the abstract:
"Before the arrival of Europeans, domestic cattle (Bos taurus) did not exist in the Americas, and most of our knowledge about how domestic bovines first arrived in the Western Hemisphere is based on historical documents. Sixteenth-century colonial accounts suggest that the first cattle were brought in small numbers from the southern Iberian Peninsula via the Canary archipelago to the Caribbean islands where they were bred locally and imported to other circum-Caribbean regions. Modern American heritage cattle genetics and limited ancient mtDNA data from archaeological colonial cattle suggest a more complex story of mixed ancestries from Europe and Africa. So far little information exists to understand the nature and timing of the arrival of these mixed-ancestry populations. In this study we combine ancient mitochondrial and nuclear DNA from a robust sample of some of the earliest archaeological specimens from Caribbean and Mesoamerican sites to clarify the origins and the dynamics of bovine introduction into the Americas. Our analyses support first arrival of cattle from diverse locales and potentially confirm the early arrival of African-sourced cattle in the Americas, followed by waves of later introductions from various sources over several centuries."

"... The question of the potential African origin of some colonial cattle is of immense historical significance and has deep social and cultural ramifications, particularly when considering the central role played by African workers in setting up the ranching industry in the colonial Americas. Our archaeological genetic evidence of cattle parallels these documented aspects of the early Spanish Empire in the Americas: the organization of the colonial labor system, the timing of the African slave trade, and the high specialization of enslaved workers in cattle management. While the European colonists held most of the economic and political power, they relied on a diverse workforce, mainly composed of Native and African coerced workers to generate their wealth in both urban and rural regions from Mexico to Peru. In rural areas, the knowledge of these laborers and their adaptability to the tropical conditions of some parts of Spanish America were also particularly valued. Workers of African descent were particularly prominent in one craft in particular: cattle ranching. Numerous historical sources suggest that this enslaved workforce played a crucial role in the management of the numerous herds of cattle that roamed semi-freely in different regions of the Americas (Caribbean, Gulf Coast of Mexico, Oaxaca, South American Llanos). Overall, it seems that complex, trans-colonial collaborations opened a potential conduit for a wide array of products (including cattle) alongside enslaved Africans into the Caribbean and Mesoamerican regions after the 1550s CE. ..."

Americas’ first cowboys were enslaved Africans, ancient cow DNA suggests | Science | AAAS

No comments: