The DNA of ancient people buried in the San Francisco Bay Area has long waited for the chance to confirm what the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe’s modern-day members already knew: Their ancestors resided there for millennia. Researchers recently reconstructed the ancient genomes, as reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, verifying that the tribe’s connection to the area indeed goes back at least 2,000 years.
“It seems like the Ohlone community has been in the San Francisco Bay Area a lot longer than was hypothesized in the scientific literature,” says Ripan Malhi, a molecular anthropologist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and corresponding author of the new study. The research also gives weight to the connection present-day Muwekma Ohlone people have with their ancestors — a link that has been denied for decades.
