Researchers speculate that a cooling climate made Newfoundland less hospitable to people who were, by then, adapted to living off marine mammals and other coastal resources.Ms. At some point, they crossed over to the island of Newfoundland where they left a long record of habitation that lasted until about 3,200 years ago. And it only provides information about the maternal line of descent of the two peoples, because the work was done using mitochondrial DNA, which is passed down from mother to offspring.Ingeborg Marshall still remembers the day, 18 years ago, when she was presented with a single strand of hair clipped from Shanawdithit, the last known member of the Beothuk, the now-vanished Indigenous people of Newfoundland.He said he would welcome further genetic studies to see what connections to the Beothuk might be discovered, including the possibility, based on oral tradition, that some Beothuk fled Newfoundland as their population faced extinction.Kevin Van Paassen/The Globe and MailIn a study co-authored by Ms. Marshall and published Thursday in the journal Current Biology, researchers have, for the first time, managed to sequence DNA retrieved from the remains of several Beothuk individuals along with those from an older, prehistoric culture that existed in Newfoundland thousands of years earlier.The Spirit of the Beothuk, a statue created by artist Gerald Squires, at Boyd's Cove, Nfld., on Sept. 10, 2011.The results suggest the two groups are not closely related. Marshall soon learned that a piece of cut hair without its root would not provide the information she sought. The answer is not at all.Powerful. Newfoundland, Canadas youngest province, has been inhabited for thousands of years. But the long-running scientific quest she embarked on then has now borne surprising fruit.Over the next 2,000 years or so, the island was frequented by Paleo-Eskimo groups spreading southward from the Arctic. Duggan and Grimes presented their results during a meeting with Indigenous community members held at Memorial University. Until now, he said, the conventional view has been that all Indigenous peoples in the region were derived from the same ancestral population.
The Beothuk were consequently thought to have gone culturally extinct when their last-known member, Shanawdithit, died of tuberculosis in 1829. Before the sampling began, they sought permission from six First Nations and Inuit communities who currently reside in Newfoundland and Labrador. Duggan, who happens to be a Newfoundlander, added that the study does not address whether there are any traces of Beothuk ancestry in people living in the province today, as some have maintained. Previous archaeological surveys and amateur finds indicated that it was likely that the Beothuk had lived in the area prior to European encounter. 1801 – June 6, 1829), also noted as Shawnadithititis, Shawnawdithit, Nancy April and Nancy Shanawdithit, was the last known living member of the Beothuk people, who inhabited what is now Newfoundland, Canada. Shanawdithit (ca.