Scientists Reveal Shocking Genetic Origin of Mexicans! They Were Never Who We Thought!

Five hundred years ago, Hernán Cortés walked into Tenochtitlan, capital of an empire of twenty-five million people. Within a century, twenty-two million were dead. This video traces the genetic record of that catastrophe through landmark studies from Stanford, INMEGEN, the Max Planck Institute, and Harvard, decoding the admixture pattern of the modern Mexican genome, the four Indigenous substructures still visible today, and what the chromosomes record about one of the largest demographic events in human history. SOURCES: Moreno-Estrada et al., "The genetics of Mexico recapitulates Native American substructure and affects biomedical traits," Science (2014) https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/s... Vågene et al., "Salmonella enterica genomes from victims of a major sixteenth-century epidemic in Mexico," Nature Ecology & Evolution (2018) https://www.nature.com/articles/s4155... Olalde et al., "The genomic history of the Iberian Peninsula over the past 8000 years," Science (2019) https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/s... National Geographic, "Deadly Aztec epidemic 'cocoliztli' linked to salmonella" https://www.nationalgeographic.com/hi... PBS NewsHour, "How smallpox devastated the Aztecs, and helped Spain conquer an American civilization 500 years ago" https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/... UNESCO, "Mexico is also Afro!" https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/me...