Tafuri Mary Anne, Zangrando Atilio Francisco Javier, Tessone Augusto, Kochi Sayuri, Moggi Cecchi Jacopo, Di Vincenzo Fabio, Profico Antonio, Manzi Giorgio
Dipartimento di Biologia Ambientale, Sapienza Università di Roma, Rome, Italy.
CADIC - CONICET, Ushuaia, Argentina.
PLoS One. 2017 Apr 13;12(4):e0175594. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0175594. eCollection 2017.
The native groups of Patagonia have relied on a hunter-gatherer economy well after the first Europeans and North Americans reached this part of the world. The large exploitation of marine mammals (i.e., seals) by such allochthonous groups has had a strong impact on the local ecology in a way that might have forced the natives to adjust their subsistence strategies. Similarly, the introduction of new foods might have changed local diet. These are the premises of our isotopic-based analysis. There is a large set of paleonutritional investigations through isotopic analysis on Fuegians groups, however a systematic exploration of food practices across time in relation to possible pre- and post-contact changes is still lacking. In this paper we investigate dietary variation in hunter-gatherer groups of Tierra del Fuego in a diachronic perspective, through measuring the isotopic ratio of carbon (∂13C) and nitrogen (∂15N) in the bone collagen of human and a selection of terrestrial and marine animal samples. The data obtained reveal an unexpected isotopic uniformity across prehistoric and recent groups, with little variation in both carbon and nitrogen mean values, which we interpret as the possible evidence of resilience among these groups and persistence of subsistence strategies, allowing inferences on the dramatic contraction (and extinction) of Fuegian populations.
在第一批欧洲人和北美人抵达巴塔哥尼亚这片区域之后很久，当地的原住民群体一直依赖狩猎采集经济。这些外来群体对海洋哺乳动物（如海豹）的大量捕杀，对当地生态产生了重大影响，这种影响可能迫使原住民调整他们的生存策略。同样，新食物的引入可能改变了当地的饮食结构。这些就是我们基于同位素分析的前提。通过对火地岛人群进行同位素分析，已经有大量关于古营养的研究，然而，对于接触前后可能发生的变化，仍然缺乏对不同时期食物习惯的系统探索。在本文中，我们通过测量人类以及一些陆地和海洋动物样本骨骼胶原蛋白中的碳同位素比率（∂13C）和氮同位素比率（∂15N），从历时的角度研究火地岛狩猎采集群体饮食的变化。所获得的数据揭示了史前群体和近代群体之间出人意料的同位素一致性，碳和氮的平均值变化很小，我们将此解释为这些群体具有恢复力以及生存策略持续存在的可能证据，从而可以推断火地岛人口的急剧减少（以及灭绝）情况。
