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SUMMARY:Journal Club: Ancient DNA Recovers the Origins of Māori Feather C
 loaks - Simon Baxter
DTSTART:20111103T130000Z
DTEND:20111103T140000Z
UID:TALK34450@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Simon Baxter
DESCRIPTION:Feather cloaks (“kakahu”)\, particularly those adorned wit
 h kiwi feathers\, are treasured items or “taonga” to the Māori people
  of “Aotearoa”/New Zealand. They are considered iconic expression of M
 āori culture. Despite their status\, much of our knowledge of the materia
 ls used to construct cloaks\, the provenance of cloaks\, and the origins o
 f cloak making itself\, has been lost. We used ancient DNA methods to reco
 ver mitochondrial DNA sequences from 849 feather samples taken from 109 cl
 oaks. We show that almost all (>99%) of the cloaks were constructed using 
 feathers from North Island brown kiwi. Molecular sexing of nuclear DNA rec
 overed from 92 feather cloak samples also revealed that the sex ratio of b
 irds deviated from a ratio of 1:1 observed in reference populations. Addit
 ionally\, we constructed a database of 185 mitochondrial control region DN
 A sequences of kiwi feathers comprising samples collected from 26 North Is
 land locations together with data available from the literature. Genetic s
 ubdivision (GST)\, nucleotide subdivision (NST) and Spatial Analysis of Mo
 lecular Variants (SAMOVA) analyses revealed high levels of genetic structu
 ring in North Island brown kiwi. Together with sequence data from previous
 ly studied ancient and modern kiwi samples\, we were able to determine the
  geographic provenance of 847 cloak feathers from 108 cloaks. A surprising
  proportion (15%) of cloaks were found to contain feathers from different 
 geographic locations\, providing evidence of kiwi trading among Māori tri
 bes or organized hunting trips into other tribal areas. Our data also sugg
 est that the east of the North Island of New Zealand was the most prolific
  of all kiwi cloak making areas\, with over 50% of all cloaks analyzed ori
 ginating from this region. Similar molecular approaches have the potential
  to discover a wealth of lost information from artifacts of endemic cultur
 es worldwide. 
LOCATION:Basement Seminar Room\, Department of Zoology
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