Ancient DNA Insights into Aboriginal Australian Mortuary Practices

Abstract

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 Paleogenetics is a relatively new and promising field that has the potential to provide new information about past Indigenous social systems, including insights into the complexity of burial practices. We present results of the first ancient DNA (aDNA) investigation into traditional mortuary practices among Australian Aboriginal people with a focus on North-East Australia. We recovered mitochondrial and Y chromosome sequences from five ancestral Aboriginal Australian remains that were excavated from the Flinders Island group in Cape York, Queensland. Two of these individuals were sampled from disturbed beach burials, while the other three were from bundle burials located in rock shelters. Genomic analyses showed that individuals from all three rock shelter burials and one of the two beach burials had a close genealogical relationship to contemporary individuals from communities from Cape York. In contrast the remaining male individual, found buried on the beach, had a mitochondrial DNA sequence that suggested that he was not from this location but that he was closely related to people from central Queensland or New South Wales. In addition, this individual was associated with a distinctive burial practice to the other four people. It has been suggested that traditionally non-locals or lower status individuals were buried on beaches. Our findings suggest that theories put forward about beach burials being non-local, or less esteemed members of the community, can potentially be resolved through analyses of uniparental genomic data. Generally, these results support the suggestion often derived from ethnohistoric accounts that inequality in Indigenous Australian mortuary practices might be based on the status, sex, and/or age of individuals and may instead relate to place of bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.06.11.145482; this version posted June 12, 2020. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. 38 39 40 41 geographic origin. There is, however, some departure from the traditional ethnohistoric account in that complex mortuary internments were also offered to female individuals of the community, with genomic analyses helping to confirm that the gender of one of the rockshelter internments was that of a young female. 42 1 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 A better understanding of how people lived in the past can be revealed by an examination of their skeletal remains, which can assist in reconstructing their life history. The examination of their burial context reveals information on how they were treated after death. Traditionally this level of understanding has been reconstructed using methods from biological anthropology. These methods can include studies of craniometrics and biological traits that can provide insights into the genetic relatedness of an individual Pardoe (1993). Moreover, the examination of the health status of an individual which provides insights into how the individual may have been nursed or cared for by that society during life (Tilley, 2015). Taphonomic investigations of burial sites and the arrangement of the deceased in the grave provide important information on the status of an individual (Pearson, 1999). However, the methods based on archaeological and anthropological assessments are sometimes insufficient to establish the sex and biological kinship relationships particularly when ancestral remains are heavily eroded or damaged and when comparative datasets simply do not exist for multivariate analyses of metric and non-metric data. The uses of ancient DNA (aDNA) can provide more precise information about the biological affinity among individuals in past populations to complement the other bioarcheological findings. The field of ancient DNA has expanded rapidly since its inception in 1984 (Kutanan et al., 2017). It has now impacted a large number of different disciplines including biological anthropology. Ancient DNA studies have the potential to provide new information about cultural traditions and specifically burial practices. 61 62 63 64 65 Biparentally inherited genomic data has been successively used in population studies for repatriation purposes (Heupink et al., 2016; Malaspinas et al., 2016). However, due to the highly fragmented nature of aDNA, this whole-genome approach could be inefficient when studying the burial practices of poorly preserved remains (Collard et al., 2019). It is typically more feasible to recover high copy number uniparental mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from human remains (Wright et al., 2018). 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 The Flinders Island group is located in the tropical north-east of Queensland, off the eastern coast of Cape York Peninsula. The group consists of seven continental Islands, sitting within the Princess Charlotte Bay, west from Cape Melville (Figure 1). Over the past two centuries, Indigenous people from these Islands have been regularly involved in maritime industries. Cultural changes that have included increased European contact have also resulted in the removal and theft of many Indigenous cave bundle burials (Horsfall, 1991 ). Not only were ancient remains affected by these activities, but so too were the Indigenous people of Flinders themselves. Since the Second World War many Indigenous people were forcefully removed from Flinders Island (Wurrima) to the mainland as a result of government regulations at that time (Rigsby & Chase, 1998). 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 Princess Charlotte Bay was first recorded by British navigators in 1815 (Jack, 1921). Princess Charlotte Bay was situated within the early shipping routes of the east coast of Australia, allowing early contact between Europeans and Traditional Owners in the 19th Century (Coppinger, 1883; King, 1827; Roth, 1898). Although there has been extensive archaeological research conducted in the Flinders Group, no research to date has extended to mortuary practices. Little attention has been paid to many of the burial sites on the islands, or indeed throughout many parts of Cape York. Archaeological examinations carried out by Beaton in 1985 revealed that there has been an Aboriginal occupation of the Flinders