Nearly every ancient-DNA study of Indigenous North American remains has been designed by outside researchers. Many were conducted without meaningful consent, some over explicit objection, and the resulting mistrust is entirely earned. It is the reason many Indigenous communities decline to participate in genomic research at all.
A 2025 study inverts that arrangement. Picuris Pueblo, a federally recognised sovereign nation in the Northern Rio Grande region of New Mexico, initiated the project itself, defined the questions, retained control of the data, and kept the right to stop the work at any point. The genetics served the tribe's purposes, not a laboratory's.
The findings are reported in Picuris Pueblo oral history and genomics reveal continuity in US Southwest in Nature, based on genomes from 16 ancient Picuris individuals and 13 present-day members of the tribe.
The short answer: genomes spanning the last millennium show genetic continuity between ancient and present-day Picuris, and a close relationship with Ancestral Puebloans from Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon, 275 km west. The data show no population decline before European arrival, and no Athabascan ancestry in individuals predating 1500 CE. The study was initiated and governed by the tribe, which retained control of the genetic data throughout.
Why the tribe wanted the study#
Picuris Pueblo's oral tradition describes a long connection to the Northern Rio Grande and a relationship to the Ancestral Puebloan world centred on Chaco Canyon. Oral histories are evidence, and in this case detailed evidence — but in United States legal and administrative settings they have routinely been treated as less authoritative than documents or excavation reports.
That asymmetry has practical consequences. Chaco Canyon has been the subject of long disputes over oil and gas development, and questions of which tribes hold ancestral standing there are not abstract. When arguments grounded in oral history were repeatedly given little weight, Picuris officials approached researchers to add a form of evidence that institutions do treat as authoritative.
The framing in the paper is explicit about this: ancient DNA is offered as a complement to traditional knowledge, addressing gaps the tribe itself identified — not as a correction to it, and not as an external verification of whether the community's account of itself is true.
How the study was governed#
The governance arrangements are as much a result of this project as the genetics, and they departed from precedent in several specific ways:
- The tribe initiated the research, approaching the researchers rather than being approached.
- Consultation ran for around two years before any sampling took place.
- The tribe retained the right to halt the project at any stage, including after results existed.
- Genetic data remained under Indigenous control, rather than being deposited by default in an open archive.
- Present-day tribal members participated as living donors, which is what made continuity testable at all.
- Oral tradition, archaeology, ethnography and genetics were treated as parallel evidence, not ranked.
That last point is the one most likely to be lost in summary. The paper does not present DNA as having settled anything the community was uncertain about. It presents four kinds of evidence agreeing.
Continuity across a millennium#
The genomic result most directly addressing the tribe's question is continuity between ancient and present-day Picuris. The 16 ancient individuals and the 13 living participants form a genetically continuous population across roughly the last thousand years.
That is not a trivial finding in the North American Southwest. The region saw substantial reorganisation over that period — the depopulation of major centres, the movement of communities, the arrival of Spanish colonists after 1598, and severe population loss thereafter. Continuity through all of it means the people at Picuris today descend from the people who were there before any of it.
The second result extends the connection westward. The ancient Picuris individuals show a close genetic relationship with Ancestral Puebloans from Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon, 275 km away — the strongest genomic link yet demonstrated between a present-day tribe and that site. The paper describes it as a firm spatiotemporal link among Puebloan populations of the North American Southwest.
Two negative results that overturn old models#
Alongside the continuity findings sit two absences, and both contradict long-standing scholarly assumptions.
No population decline before European arrival. Some models had proposed that Southwestern populations were already contracting before contact, for environmental or social reasons. Effective population size inferred from the genomes shows no such decline. The demographic collapse in this region followed European arrival; it did not precede it.
No Athabascan ancestry before 1500 CE. Athabascan-speaking peoples — ancestors of the Navajo and Apache — arrived in the Southwest from the north, and the timing has been debated for a century, with some proposals placing it several centuries earlier. Individuals in this dataset predating 1500 CE carry no detectable Athabascan-related ancestry, which is direct evidence against the earlier arrival hypotheses.
Both are cases where genomic data settled a question that archaeology had argued over inconclusively for decades — and in both cases, the answer aligns with what the community's own account already implied.
What it means when four kinds of evidence agree#
It is worth being precise about what agreement demonstrates here.
Oral tradition, archaeology, ethnography and genomics are independent in the sense that matters: they can fail in different ways and carry different biases. Oral history is transmitted socially and shaped by the present; archaeology reads material remains and is limited by what survives and what was excavated; genomics measures descent and is blind to language, culture and identity.
When four such lines converge on the same conclusion, the conclusion is well supported. When they diverge, the interesting question is why — and that question would be a finding too.
What genomics specifically cannot do is adjudicate identity. Genetic continuity does not establish that a community is the same community, because peoplehood is constituted by language, ceremony, kinship practice, place and self-definition, none of which are in a genome. This is a point the Rapa Nui study had to navigate as well, and it applies with particular force where the results touch on legal standing.
How continuity and decline are actually measured#
Both headline results depend on methods worth stating plainly, because "continuity" and "no decline" sound like impressions rather than measurements.
Continuity is assessed by asking whether the ancient and present-day genomes can be modelled as one population sampled at different times, rather than as populations that would require an additional source to explain. Shared segments of DNA inherited from common ancestors are informative here: relatives, however distant, share long identical stretches, and the pattern of that sharing between ancient and living individuals is difficult to produce by chance or by a large influx of outside ancestry.
Population size is inferred from genetic diversity and from the length distribution of those shared segments. A population that contracts sharply passes through a bottleneck, and bottlenecks leave a signature: reduced diversity, and longer shared segments because everyone descends from a smaller pool of recent ancestors. Reading that signature backwards gives a trajectory of effective population size through time — and in this dataset it shows no contraction before European arrival.
Neither method is exact. Effective population size is a modelled quantity rather than a headcount, and with 29 individuals the confidence intervals are wide. What they are able to exclude is a severe pre-contact collapse, which is precisely what the models being tested had proposed.
Limitations#
| Limitation | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| 16 ancient and 13 present-day individuals | Small samples cannot capture a community's full genetic diversity. |
| One tribe, one region | Findings describe Picuris; other Pueblo communities have their own histories. |
| Continuity is not identity | Genetics tracks descent, not language, ceremony or peoplehood. |
| Absence of Athabascan ancestry is sample-bound | It applies to those individuals, not to every pre-1500 community. |
| Data access is deliberately restricted | Independent reanalysis is constrained — an intended consequence of tribal control. |
| Ancestral claims are legal and political | Genomic evidence informs such questions; it does not decide them. |
Frequently asked questions about the Picuris Pueblo study#
Who initiated this research?#
Picuris Pueblo, a federally recognised sovereign nation in New Mexico. Tribal officials approached the researchers, defined the questions, and retained the right to halt the project at any point.
How many individuals were sequenced?#
Genomes were generated from 16 ancient Picuris individuals and 13 present-day members of the tribe, spanning roughly the last millennium.
What is the connection to Chaco Canyon?#
Ancient and present-day Picuris show a close genetic relationship with Ancestral Puebloans from Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon, 275 km to the west — the firmest genomic link established between a present-day tribe and that site.
Did the study find a population decline before Europeans arrived?#
No. Effective population size shows no decline before European arrival, contradicting models that proposed a pre-contact contraction.
What does the absence of Athabascan ancestry show?#
Individuals predating 1500 CE carry no detectable Athabascan-related ancestry, which argues against hypotheses placing the Athabascan migration into the Southwest several centuries earlier.
Does genetic continuity prove tribal identity?#
No, and the study does not claim it. Identity rests on language, ceremony, kinship, place and self-definition. What the genomes show is biological descent, which is one kind of evidence among several.
A model other communities can use or refuse#
The scientific findings here are solid and, in two cases, correct long-standing errors in the literature. But the most consequential part of this paper may be its structure.
It demonstrates that ancient-DNA research can be conducted with a tribe as the initiating and governing party: the community defining the questions, controlling the data, and retaining the ability to stop. That configuration answers the objection that has made many Indigenous nations decline such work — not by arguing them out of it, but by removing the conditions that made refusal reasonable.
It does not oblige anyone. A community that does not want its ancestors sequenced under any arrangement is entitled to that, and this study strengthens rather than weakens that position, because it establishes that the terms are negotiable and that the default was never inevitable. What Picuris demonstrated is that when a tribe sets the terms, the science and the sovereignty are compatible.
Sources and further reading#
- Pinotti, T., Adler, M. A., Mermejo, R. et al. (2025). Picuris Pueblo oral history and genomics reveal continuity in US Southwest. Nature 642, 125–132. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-08791-9.
- Kennett, D. J., Plog, S., George, R. J. et al. (2017). Archaeogenomic evidence reveals prehistoric matrilineal dynasty. Nature Communications 8, 14115 — the Pueblo Bonito study this work compares against.
- Lonetree, A. and other scholarship on Indigenous data sovereignty and the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance.
Editorial note: this article was written as a source-based synthesis and treats the study's governance arrangements as part of its findings. Its hero and section artwork was generated with AI as an interpretive architectural scene, not as scientific evidence, and does not depict Picuris Pueblo, its members or its ancestors.
