This article originally stated that the Taíno were extinct,
which is incorrect. Nature apologizes for the offence caused,
and has corrected the text to better explain the research
project described. This is, of course, nonsense. How timorous
has the modern scientific culture become, that it is willing to
acquiesce so easily, lest one be perceived as not having
sufficient "sensitivity" in matters ethnic? When we say that the
Taíno are extinct, we are, in fact claiming that a population
group is extinct. We do not say that pieces of DNA are extinct,
or that words in a language are extinct. There are pieces of
Taíno DNA in modern Puerto Ricans, and there are Taíno words in
the Spanish spoken there. But the Taíno group is extinct. For
example, you will not found any aurochsen (Bos primigenius) in
Europe today, even though they did pass on some of their genes
to modern European cattle. The aurochsen are extinct, even
though some of their genes persist. You can say that modern
European cattle are just Bos taurus in