Virus hunt reveals that ancient Mongols migrated to Andes

A dialog from the Taino-L, December 1999

PARIS, Nov 29 (AFP) - Japanese researchers examining 1,500-year-old mummified remains in Chile have provided the first evidence that ancient Mongols migrated to the Andes before the colonial era, the British-published journal Nature Medicine reports in December's edition.

They launched a painstaking detective hunt after they analysed the DNA of a leukaemia virus in the bone marrow of the mummy, found in northern Chile.

The virus is called human T-cell lymphotropic virus type 1 (HTLV-1), which is associated with types of leukaemia and neurological disorders, and is clustered mainly in southwestern Japan and in South America.

Sequences from this ancient genetic evidence were similar to that found among contemporary Andeans and Japanese, they found.

The result provides evidence that HTLV with ancient Mongoloids to the Andes before the colonial era, the researchers wrote.

Analysis of ancient HTLV-1 sequences could be a useful tool for studying the history of human retroviral infection as well as human prehistoric migration.

A total of 104 mummified bone marrow specimens were examined.

The 10-member research team was led by Kazuo Tajima of the Aichi Cancer Centre Research Institute of Nagoya.

Regarding Lary's post on Mongol imigrants in Chile as per Japanese Researchers is very interesting. This will only add fuel to the long held contention that skins came here across the land bridge. Often this is written up as Indians as the first pioneers in America, or the first boat people.

Somehow this focus on Indians as transient explorers or settlers, allows for Anglo mainstream contentions that we were just that, the first of a series of imigrants who make up this country, and those other countries in the Americas. This is then carried forward to indicate that we are not the true owners of our indigenous home sites, because we are in fact tourists ourselves. I mention this because I hear a lot of this contention being played out to lead into stories as to why Europeans were justified in taking our lands and again, for killing off a lot of our ancestors.

Strange though, that this focus can be made and maintained, when if we use the same arguement, that all humans started off in Africa and then migrated around to some other location, we can then say that England for example, is made up of tourists, so taking their land away from them is O.K. too, if thats what we want, and are capable of doing. I think that if so presented, Europeans would balk bitterly about the loss of their homelands just as we do about ours. The point of all this is that just because people around the world are doing their best to place us somewhere else on the globe, it does not mean a hill of beans in reality, until some ambitious non-indian starts trying to use these scientific facts to justify a taking somewhere on the planet. We need to watch for this, I think, as I expect that this absurd arguement will be made somewhere down the line.