Figure 1

The Bahamian Archipelago. The lightest shade of blue represents the carbonate banks. On the Little Bahamas Bank, for example, are the islands of Grand Bahama and Abaco. Major islands on the Great Bahama Bank include Andros, New Providence, Eleuthera, and Long Island. The Crooked-Acklins Bank sustains Crooked and Acklins islands. Islands such as Mayaguana and Inagua were never connected to any other islands regardless of sea levels. The Lucayans colonized the Bahamas either from Cuba and/or from Hispaniola. Historically, Bahamian hutia occurred across the Bahamas. Today hutias are restricted to a few small islands (indicated by red arrows) including Little Wax Cay (1), Warderick Wells Cay (2), and East Plana Cay (labeled). Stars indicate the successful sampling localities for the ancient DNA portion of this study. The earliest archaeological site that shows hutia exploitation is from Major’s Landing on Crooked Island⁴², which is under the star on Crooked Island. The genetic break found in our data is indicated by the black bar between Long Island and Crooked and Acklins Islands (see Results). To make this figure, we cropped the bathymetry data layer from Eakins and Sharma⁷¹ to the Caribbean region using ArcMap version 10.1⁷².