The Karitiana or Caritiana are an

indigenous people of Brazil Indigenous peoples in Brazil ( pt, povos indígenas no Brasil) or Indigenous Brazilians ( pt, indígenas brasileiros, links=no) once comprised an estimated 2000 tribes and nations inhabiting what is now the country of Brazil, before European con ...

, whose reservation is located in the western

Amazon Amazon most often refers to: * Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek mythology * Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin * Amazon River, in South America * Amazon (company), an American multinational technology c ...

. They count 320 members, and the leader of their tribal association is Renato Caritiana. They subsist by farming, fishing and hunting, and have almost no contact with the outside world. Their tongue, the Karitiâna language, is an Arikém language of

Brazil Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...

. Studies of

population genetics Population genetics is a subfield of genetics that deals with genetic differences within and between populations, and is a part of evolutionary biology. Studies in this branch of biology examine such phenomena as adaptation, speciation, and pop ...

often use the Karitiana as a reference population for Native Americans, using DNA samples made available through the

Human Genome Diversity Project The Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP) was started by Stanford University's Morrison Institute in 1990s along with collaboration of scientists around the world. It is the result of many years of work by Luigi Cavalli-Sforza, one of the most ci ...

and other sources. DNA from Karitiana individuals was collected in 1987 by Francis Black and in 2007 it was reported that this sampling was undertaken unbeknownst to

FUNAI is a Japanese consumer electronics company headquartered in Daitō, Osaka. Apart from producing its own branded electronic products, it is also an OEM providing assembled televisions and video players/recorders to major corporations such as Sh ...

, the Brazilian agency that regulates contact between the indigenous tribes and the outside world, and that the samples were being distributed for a fee with no benefit to the Karitiana, giving rise to claims of

biopiracy Biopiracy (also known as scientific colonialism) is defined as the unauthorized appropriation of knowledge and genetic resources of farming and indigenous communities by individuals or institutions seeking exclusive monopoly control through patent ...

. The same newspaper report claimed that further samples were taken in 1996 by Dr. Hilton Pereira da Silva, a doctor on a documentary film crew, on the promise of medicinal supplies that were never fulfilled. A response from Dr. Silva suggests that the news story was faulty and the medicinal samples he took were never used for any commercial purpose.

Origins

A 2015 genetic study reached a surprising conclusion about the origins of the Karitiana people. While the Karitiana people are closely related to other Native Americans, they share closer relations to Southeast Asians & Polynesians compared with other Native Americans which are closest to Siberians and Northeast Asians. A study by Iosif Lazaridis (2014) found Karitiana to carry Mal'ta MA1 (41%) admixture while the other geneflow in Karitiana appears to have an Eastern Eurasian origin. A study by Kanazawa-Kiriyama et al. (2017) detected gene flow from Karitiana to Mal'ta MA1 (21%) which is in the reverse direction of what was reported in previous studies such as Raghavan ''et al.'' 2014 who used a much larger sequence data. The authors speculate that the inverse flow could be due to Ancient Beringian migration in a westward migration into Eurasia.

References

External links

Karitiâna artwork

National Museum of the American Indian The National Museum of the American Indian is a museum in the United States devoted to the culture of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. It is part of the Smithsonian Institution group of museums and research centers. The museum has three ...

"In the Amazon, Giving Blood but Getting Nothing,"
''New York Times'' article about Karitiana and DNA collection Ethnic groups in Brazil Indigenous peoples in Brazil Indigenous peoples of the Amazon {{brazil-ethno-group-stub