Strange Quark Today

The Tainos were a pre-Columbian indigenous people living in the Caribbean region. Christopher Columbus met their large population when he landed on the island of Hispaniola in 1492. In two previous articles of this series we explored the history of the Tainos, and their status in present day populations of the Caribbean. We learned that although historians had previously declared the Tainos race to be extinct, one study done in Puerto Rico found that over 61% of the population had Amerindian mitochondrial DNA. Those results supported the findings of biology professor Juan Carlos Martinez at the University of Puerto Rico, who conducted his own studies. He suggested that the prevalence of indigenous mitochondrial DNA in people of the Caribbean may be even more than that of Caucasoid and Negroid. [...]