Interview with anthropologist Patricia Tovar
This project is part of a much larger exploration that looks at the history of women during the Spanish Conquest and the Age of Discoveries.
Category project
Collaboration of indigenous communities is at the core of genetic ancestry research
Indigenous communities are the foundation of any scientific research investigating the cultural and biological history of human populations. Interactions with indigenous communities, with their agreement, enable researchers to collect data and indispensable knowledge to guarantee the long-term success of a project.
The challenges of sample collection in our human genetic diversity study
Human population genetics seeks to learn about modern humans’ genetic diversity and molecular evolution. The first step of any study is a good sampling to get the accurate landscape of the population. Within the project of Magalhães' voyage, this was a real challenge for the team in light of the pandemic.
The genetic screening behind the ancestry tests
Ancestry testing brings together interests in family history and genetics, a trend that is here to stay. But few people understand how ancestry testing works. In this article, we explain how a small sample of saliva can give us immense information about an individual's genetic history and how the size of databases can change details about our ancestry. Nevertheless, genetics is only a small piece of the puzzle of who we are.
The idea behind this project
It is extremely rare that a call for research projects allows us to apply our expertise in addressing a global symbolic historical moment: the circumnavigation by Fernão Magalhães’s crew. For human population geneticists, that 500-year-old expedition was amazing in enabling the first contact between so many diverse human populations. And that was the mote we followed to launch our project.