ANCIENT DNA FROM POLYNESIAN RATS - EXTRACTION, AMPLIFICATION AND SEQUENCE FROM SINGLE SMALL BONES

The human colonisation of Polynesia was a major event in world prehist ory. It represents one of the last human population migrations, and on e which required crossing major water barriers. Though the subject of Pacific population origins has been approached by scholars from numero us fields for nearly a century, recent years have seen the problem add ressed by human geneticists [1-5]. Since the initial report describing the recovery of DNA from skeletal remains [6], ancient DNA studies ha ve also focused on the Pacific region [7, 8]. In this paper we present the results of ancient DNA analyses of Rattus exulans, an animal that was transported by ancestral Polynesians through the Pacific to the f ar reaches of the Polynesian triangle. Analysis of DNA of R. exulans s keletal remains has many advantages over studies of ancient human rema ins, yet the one drawback has been the recovery of ancient DNA from si ngle bones of these very small rodents. We have successfully modified standard extraction protocols for ancient DNA [9] and have consistentl y extracted, amplified and sequenced mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from le ss than 0.1 g of R. exulans bone and tooth samples recovered from arch aeological sites throughout the Pacific, ranging from 400 to 2000 year s old.