Experts Thought The Beothuk Died Out In 1829 – But Recent DNA Analysis Tells A Different Story

Before the arrival of settlers on Newfoundland’s shores, the Beothuk were as many as 2,000 in number. Sticking mostly to the coastal regions, they survived comfortably on the seals and salmon that inhabited the waters of the northern stretches of the Atlantic Ocean. And according to legend, they were there to greet the Norse explorers who made landfall long before the Europeans.

By the 19th century, however, the Beothuk had been forced inland by the settlers and cut off from their vital resources. And in 1819 two of the last surviving members met with a terrible fate. Believing that his property had been stolen by indigenous people, a fur trapper kidnapped a woman named Demasduit as revenge. And although her husband Nonosabasut tried to save her, he was killed in the struggle.

Just one year later, Demasduit herself died, a victim of the tuberculosis that the Europeans had brought with them to Newfoundland. And less than a decade later, her niece Shanawdithit succumbed to the same fate. With her, according to the history books, went the last traces of the Beothuk bloodline – although not everyone agrees.

Since at least the 15th century, the Beothuk had shared Newfoundland with the Mi’kmaq, another indigenous group. And today, the oral histories of these people claim that the bloodline still survives. Up until recently, nobody has been able to test these claims – but now science might finally have an answer.

According to historians, the Beothuk are likely to be descended from the Little Passage people, who are thought to have migrated from Labrador on the North American mainland to Newfoundland in antiquity. And by the time that the European settlers arrived in the 16th century, their culture was thriving. However, the indigenous communities on the island’s northern and southern coasts would struggle to adapt to this new world.

Before European contact, the Beothuk survived on a diet of sea creatures, occasionally venturing inland in search of different prey. During the summer months, they lived in tents covered with either bark or animal skin, while the winters were spent huddled in shelters dug out of the ground.

Centuries earlier, violent Norsemen had arrived in Newfoundland, leaving the Beothuk rightly wary of outsiders. And so, when European settlements began to spring up along the coast, the indigenous people relocated inland to escape. But as a result, they were cut off from their traditional fishing grounds, necessitating a drastic lifestyle change.

As their environment shifted, the Beothuk adapted their diet accordingly, surviving on caribou and other creatures that they could hunt on the land. However, they struggled to adapt, and by the beginning of the 19th century their numbers had dwindled drastically. And eventually Shanawdithit, the last known Beothuk, died in 1829.

According to accepted history, Shanawdithit’s death represented the complete extinction of the Beothuk people. However, there are many who have refused to accept that these early inhabitants of Newfoundland simply ceased to exist. And over the years, several attempts have been made to identify their descendants.

In North Carolina, for example, Carol Reynolds-Boyce had grown up believing that her family was descended from aboriginal people. And after tracing her genealogy, she came to believe that she had specifically Beothuk roots. Apparently, her mother was from Newfoundland, where she had met and married an American before emigrating to the U.S.

According to Reynolds-Boyce, her family later left the U.S. and migrated back to Newfoundland. However, she believes that they took steps to hide their Beothuk heritage. Even today, she claims to own land on the island and has appeared at First Nation events as a figurehead for the supposedly extinct people.

Eventually, however, Reynolds-Boyce decided to get DNA evidence to support her claim. In a 2017 interview with Newfoundland and Labrador newspaper The Telegram, she explained, “I thought it was time to prove that we are not extinct, but endangered, so I finally took the test and the results came out on October 16, 2016.”

At first glance, it appeared as if the test confirmed what Reynolds-Boyce had always suspected: that she was descended from the Beothuk. However, some experts were quick to cast doubt on the results, which came from the Toronto company Accu-Metrics. According to geneticist Steve Carr, for example, such an identification would have been impossible to make with the limited information available at the time.

In fact, Carr himself had previously worked with the only known samples of Beothuk DNA – the skulls of Nonosabasut and Demasduit, which were exhumed and sent to Scotland in 1828. In a 2017 interview with Canadian TV broadcaster CBC, the biology professor based at Newfoundland’s Memorial University explained his doubts. “We do not have enough of a database to identify someone as being Beothuk,” he said. “So if somebody is told [that] by a company, I think we call that being lied to.”

At other institutions, more academics agreed – there was simply not enough DNA on record to support Accu-Metrics’ conclusions. However, the company itself appeared to take a different stance. According to director of operations Harvey Tenenbaum, the Beothuk DNA was in their database, and their system automatically made the connection with Reynolds-Boyce.

Back in North Carolina, Reynolds-Boyce was buoyed by the revelations, despite criticism of Accu-Metrics’ methods. Having been appointed chief by her mother and brother, who allegedly received similar results, she established the Beothuk First Nation and set up a Facebook page. So far, however, she has failed to gain official recognition for her attempt to resurrect the past.

Nevertheless, for Reynolds-Boyce, the results represented a victory for her people. Speaking to The Telegram, she explained, “It’s a bad feeling when people say you are extinct, that you don’t exist, that you don’t count. This is political genocide.” After criticism of its testing, however, Accu-Metrics removed the Beothuk DNA from its database, preventing any other would-be descendants from joining the cause.

While all of this was going on, another Beothuk drama was playing out thousands of miles from Newfoundland, at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. Ever since 2015 Chief Joe, a representative of the Mi’kmaq First Nation Miawpukek Mi’kamawey Mawi’omi, had been campaigning to get the remains of Nonosabasut and Demasduit returned to their native land.

According to reports, the remains of the two Beothuk had been taken from their grave site by William Cormack, the first European to penetrate inland and explore Newfoundland’s wild interior. No doubt keen to have them analyzed, he sent the skulls, along with a number of burial objects, to Scotland, where they remained for nearly two centuries.

Despite Chief Joe’s efforts, however, the campaign to repatriate Nonosabasut and Demasduit was not straightforward. According to government policy, it seems, such requests must be made by living descendants of those concerned. And without official recognition of the Beothuk First Nation, there was no one left to fight this battle.

Instead, Chief Joe himself traveled to Scotland, where he negotiated the return of Nonosabasut and Demasduit’s remains. And eventually, in March 2020 two of the last remaining Beothuk arrived back in Newfoundland. To greet them, a small ceremony was held at an archive in the capital city of St. John’s.

For Chief Joe, the return of Nonosabasut and Demasduit was an important moment in the struggle for recognition of indigenous peoples. In a March 2020 interview with CTV News, he explained, “They were free. They roamed this province, they honed it, they loved it and they brought their children into the world here. It was their land.”

Meanwhile, the NunatuKavut Community Council’s Todd Russell called the saga a “stark reminder of what colonialism can do and has done.” Currently, a group of indigenous representatives are discussing where Nonosabasut and Demasduit should be laid to rest. But even after a site has finally been decided upon, it’s hoped that their memory will live on.

Although their story is almost over, Nonosabasut and Demasduit will continue to inform genetic studies for many years to come. For example, in April 2020 Carr published a new study in Genome, a scientific journal. And in it, he returned to take another look at the Beothuk – with surprising results.

By that time, it seems, more Beothuk DNA had come to light. And for his research, Carr analyzed the DNA extracted from 18 sets of archaeological remains, including those of Nonosabasut and Demasduit. Specifically, he was looking at mitochondrial data, which is typically passed down from mother to child.

In order to establish whether or not there were descendants of the Beothuk still living today, Carr decided to look for any modern matches to their DNA. In order to do so, he fed the samples into GenBank, a U.S. National Institutes of Health database. And what he found was much more concrete than any previous claims.

According to reports, the database contains DNA information from a global bank of research participants, as well as those who have engaged in commercial genetic testing. With the net spread this wide, it seems, Carr finally struck gold. Soon, he had identified a potential descendant of Nonosabasut, living in Tennessee.

According to Carr, the unidentified person’s mitochondrial DNA was a match for that of Nonosabasut. But when the geneticist reached out to the man who could be one of the last living Beothuk descendants, he was met with surprise. Apparently, the Tennessee resident had been tracing his family tree and had found no evidence of any indigenous links.

In fact, the man had managed to go back five generations without finding any indication of Beothuk roots. But according to Carr, the man who could be descended from Nonosabasut was intrigued by this new development and planned to look into it further. Meanwhile, as the story hit the headlines, Chief Joe indicated that he was not surprised by the development.

In the Mi’kmaq oral history, it seems, there has long been a tradition that claims a shared ancestry between their people and the Beothuk. In a May 2020 interview with British newspaperThe Guardian, Chief Joe explained, “There were always connections or friendly relations going back more than 200 years ago and when you mingle that way, periodically, things would happen.”

Despite their oral history, however, the Mi’kmaq have often struggled to gain official recognition for their established truths. According to Chief Joe, “Academics are hard people to convince. They often have this mindset that, ‘This is the way it was’ – no matter what information we give them to the contrary.”

In his interview, for example, Chief Joe recounted an incident that had happened during a land-claim case. Apparently, the adjudicator had attempted to date the Mi’kmaq’s arrival in Newfoundland to the 18th century, despite the fact that their oral history stated otherwise. In fact, their tradition tells of indigenous people handing out maps to British settlers – a feat which would have been impossible had they been new to the region.

“It’s convenient for government, for everyone, to ignore people who had no written history,” Chief Joe continued. However, with Carr’s latest findings, there is hope that indigenous people such as the Mi’kmaq might finally gain recognition of their long-held beliefs. “This is a big thing for us,” the leader admitted. “But it all comes from something we already knew.”

Interestingly, potential evidence of a living descendant of Nonosabasut wasn’t the only thing that Carr uncovered in his research. According to reports, he was also able to confirm previous claims that the Beothuk did not share any close genetic links with an earlier group. Known as the Maritime Archaic, these people inhabited Newfoundland until roughly 1400 B.C., over 2,000 years before the Beothuk.

But even though the two groups were not closely related, Carr’s study confirmed another link. It transpires that both the Beothuk and the Maritime Archaic shared a common ancestor – a man who died on the mainland some 15,000 years ago. Apparently, this is because all of the indigenous groups in the region were likely to have been descended from one individual.

Interestingly, this isn’t the first time that scientists have tried to prove a link between the Beothuk and other indigenous groups. In fact, a possible link between the allegedly extinct people and the Mi’kmaq was also explored in a study that appeared in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. Published in 2007, it looked at potential genetic connections between the two.

Unfortunately, the researchers only had access to limited DNA samples, and as such their results were inconclusive. And even today, experts admit that the small amount of data available has had an adverse effect on any studies. In order to improve the accuracy of such work, Carr hopes to build up a more comprehensive database of genetic information.

Moving forwards, Carr plans to launch a new study, incorporating as many as 200 Mi’kmaq participants. With this broader sample size, he hopes to establish once and for all whether there is any connection between them and the supposedly extinct Beothuk. For Chief Joe, it’s a chance to confirm what he and his people have always believed.

“We shared the same island [of Newfoundland] and the island really is not that big,” Chief Joe told science news website Live Science. “Of course, from time to time, our people would encounter them and sometimes live with them.” And while he admitted that relations between the two were not always friendly, there were also times when they coexisted happily side by side. Did such relationships spawn a genetic legacy that continues to this day? Through the work of people such as Carr, we may be close to finding out the truth.