This is scientific American 60 second science. I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

Abandoned Pueblos are scattered throughout the southwestern US, and at many archaeologists have uncovered a curious artifact, the skeletons of

Scarlet Macaws. The bird's bright red feathers are known to have been an important

status symbol, a signifier of prestige, for people throughout the American tropics in the southwest,

both in the ancient world and today. But Maccass are a tropical bird whose range never extended north of today's US-Mexico border.

So how did the Pueblo people obtain the birds?

To examine the birds origin, scientists sequenced mitochondrial DNA

found within macabreones from two sites in New Mexico, Chaco Canyon and the

Membrays region.

Turns out nearly three quarters of the birds had identical mitochondrial genome sequences,

meaning the ancient birds came from the same maternal line.

That suggests they were all the products of a breeding operation, perhaps in modern day northern Mexico,

rather than a random collection of wild-caught birds.

If it was more random, you know, forgive the word plucking random makaws from the environment,

then we would have expected to see, type of diversity that you'd see in the wild.

Richard George, a PhD candidate in anthropology at Penn State.

And so when we took our results and compared them to macaws that were distributed throughout at the historic and modern ranges, the results were more analogous to other species of animals that were being bred like turkey or dogs or pigs.

The details are in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The discovery adds an additional layer of complexity to our understanding of southwestern and mezzo-American

cultures. They had the sophistication to breed and manage the distribution of these exotic birds.

And it's an example too of how modern sequencing technology can unlock historical

and cultural secrets that sat waiting in these bones for more than 800 years.

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