The Last Peoples of Tierra del Fuego: The Selk'nam, the Giant Legend and What Their DNA Reveals

Hero image: AI generated illustration of a Selk'nam hunter in a guanaco cape and triangular kochel headdress, based on early twentieth century ethnographic photographs. It is not a portrait of any real person.

On 28 May 1974, an old woman was found dead in her small house in Tierra del Fuego. Her name was Ángela Loij. She had been born around 1900 on Estancia Sara, a sheep ranch north of Río Grande where her father worked as a shepherd, and she was baptised under the name Ángela Gómez. In her last years she spent long hours with the anthropologist Anne Chapman, describing a world that had vanished around her. With her death, the last person of full Selk'nam descent was gone.

Eight years earlier, on 9 October 1966, Lola Kiepja had died in Río Grande at about 92. She was the last Selk'nam to have grown up inside a living Selk'nam community, the granddaughter of a shaman, and the voice on the recordings of Selk'nam chants that Chapman made in the 1960s and that the Musée de l'Homme in Paris later published. Between them, these two women closed a story that had lasted for thousands of years.

The Selk'nam did not disappear because their world grew poor or because they could not adapt. They were killed, deported and infected, in a few decades, by the sheep economy that took over their island at the end of the nineteenth century. Ancient DNA now allows us to look at the other end of the story: where they came from, who they mixed with, and how long their ancestors had been at the end of the world.

Four peoples at the end of the world

When Europeans arrived, Tierra del Fuego and the channels around it were shared by four peoples who lived very differently. The Selk'nam, whom Europeans called the Ona, held the grasslands, forests and hills of the north and centre of Isla Grande. In the far southeast, on the Mitre Peninsula, lived the Haush or Manek'enk, closely related to them. Both spoke languages of the Chon family, like the Tehuelche of mainland Patagonia, the Aónikenk.

The two other peoples lived on the water. The Yámana, or Yaghan, travelled the Beagle Channel and the islands down to Cape Horn in bark canoes, diving for shellfish and hunting sea lions. The Kawésqar, or Alacaluf, did the same in the maze of western channels. The Selk'nam were the land people of the island: they had no canoes, and lived from the guanaco.

A life in guanaco skin

The guanaco, the wild cousin of the llama, was at the heart of Selk'nam life. Men hunted it with bow and arrow and with bolas, helped by dogs, the only animal they domesticated. Its meat was their main food, and its hide gave them shelters, bags and clothing. Women and children gathered birds' eggs, fungi, berries and shellfish, fished for eels at low tide, collected firewood and water, and built the dwellings. When a whale stranded on the coast, it was a feast for many families.

Everyone wore a cape of hide, worn with the fur facing out. Guanaco was the usual material, although fox was preferred for capes when it could be had. The cape was also a blanket at night and a shield against wind and arrows, and the fur was sometimes rubbed with ochre mixed with fat. Babies travelled wrapped in the skin of a young guanaco, under their mother's cape. On every hunt, men tied a triangular headdress across the forehead, the kochel, a sign of adulthood. Both men and women wore their hair long with a fringe, and painted their bodies in red, black and white, with designs for the hunt, for war, for peace, for games and for ceremonies. Red was the most admired colour.

The island was divided into family territories called haruwen. Each held, on average, a few dozen people, at a density of roughly one person for every 25 square kilometres. Men who made bows, men who made arrows, and shamans held titles of honour. The great male initiation, the Hain, brought together young men, the kloketen, in a large ceremonial hut where masked spirits appeared to test and instruct them. The last Hain was held in 1923 and photographed by the missionary and ethnologist Martin Gusinde, whose pictures of painted spirit dancers are today some of the most famous images of South American indigenous culture.

The legend of the giants

The Selk'nam inherited a reputation that was born on the mainland. In 1520, while Magellan's fleet wintered at Puerto San Julián, on the coast of today's Argentine Patagonia, a man appeared on the beach. Antonio Pigafetta, the chronicler of the voyage, wrote that he was "so tall that we reached only to his waist". Magellan named these people the Patagones, probably after a giant in a Spanish romance of chivalry, and the name stuck to the whole region. He took two of them aboard. Both died on the voyage.

The legend kept growing for 250 years. Francis Fletcher, the chaplain of Francis Drake, gave seven and a half feet. In 1764, Commodore John Byron wrote of a man who "could not be much less than seven feet", and rumours in London soon spoke of nine foot natives. When a more sober account was published in 1773, the tallest man measured was 6 feet 6 inches, or 1.98 metres: very tall, but "by no means giants".

The Selk'nam were drawn into the same story. Visitors at the end of the nineteenth century, such as the American physician Frederick Cook, described them as averaging about six feet, with some men of six and a half feet, and one photograph of a Selk'nam man in the US Library of Congress carries the caption "seven foot". Martin Gusinde, who measured them in the 1920s, described them as people of high stature.

The skeletons tell a more modest story. In central Patagonia, the home of the mainland hunters, Marien Béguelin reconstructed an average stature of 170.5 cm for men and 160.8 cm for women in the late Holocene. Tall for hunter-gatherers, taller than the Yámana and Kawésqar canoe peoples, and certainly taller than many of the European sailors who met them, but not giants. Big bodies, heavy guanaco capes and a strong impression on men who had been months at sea did the rest.

Genetics adds a small twist. As we will see, the Selk'nam carried a large share of ancestry related to the Aónikenk of the mainland, the descendants of the very "Patagones" that Pigafetta met. In a way, the giants and the Ona were cousins.

Twenty years of extermination

For thousands of years the Selk'nam had the island largely to themselves. That changed in the 1880s. Gold was found, and then, much more lastingly, the grasslands were turned into enormous sheep ranches. The Chilean and Argentine governments granted huge concessions, and companies like the Sociedad Explotadora de Tierra del Fuego fenced the land where the guanaco lived. When the Selk'nam hunted the sheep that had replaced their game, the ranchers answered with violence.

Armed men were hired to clear the land. The Romanian adventurer Julius Popper was photographed in 1886 with his men beside the naked body of a Selk'nam they had killed. Ranch managers paid bounties for each Selk'nam killed, proven by a pair of hands or ears, and later by a skull. Men like the Scottish foreman Alexander MacLennan, nicknamed "the Red Pig", led massacres. Historians estimate that between 2,500 and 4,000 people died in direct killings, the large majority of the population, over some ten to twenty years. A judicial inquiry led by Judge Waldo Seguel between 1895 and 1904 confirmed that indigenous people had been hunted, but the landowners who financed it were never prosecuted.

The survivors were not left in peace. In the mid 1890s, Chile moved most of them to a Salesian mission on Dawson Island, in the Strait of Magellan, where epidemics killed a large part of those who had escaped the guns. In 1889, a family of eleven Selk'nam was kidnapped and exhibited as "cannibals" in Paris during the Exposition Universelle; only four of them ever came home.

By 1919, Gusinde counted 279 Selk'nam. By 1930 there were about a hundred, and by 1945 the missionary Lorenzo Massa counted 25. Most survivors married Chileans, Argentines or members of neighbouring peoples. This is why Lola Kiepja, whose first husband was a Haush, and Ángela Loij became "the last": not the last people with Selk'nam ancestors, but the last who grew up in the old world, and the last of full Selk'nam descent.

That distinction matters today. Families on both sides of the border descend from Selk'nam ancestors, and they reject the idea that their people are extinct. In September 2023, the Chilean Congress recognised the Selk'nam as one of the original peoples of Chile.

What ancient DNA says about their origins

The genetic history of the region has been rewritten by two studies. In 2018, Constanza de la Fuente and colleagues sequenced four genomes of canoe people from the western channels and the Beagle Channel, about 1,000 years old, and compared them with 61 people living today in southern Chile. The ancient maritime individuals were genetically equidistant from a land hunter of Tierra del Fuego, which pointed to an early split between the ancestors of the canoe peoples and those of the land hunters, followed by a later split between the Kawésqar and the Yámana. Present day Kawésqar and Yámana were the closest relatives of the ancient people from their own regions: continuity over at least a thousand years.

In 2020, Nathan Nakatsuka, Pierre Luisi, David Reich and colleagues published genome wide data from 20 ancient people from southern Patagonia and the Pampas, including five Selk'nam from northern Tierra del Fuego and six Haush from the Mitre Peninsula. Their main findings:

• Deep roots. There has been at least partial genetic continuity in southern Patagonia for about 6,600 years. The earliest canoe hunters were not newcomers from the north: their maritime way of life was invented or adopted locally.
• Land and sea diverge. By about 4,700 years ago, the ancestors of the sea peoples had become genetically distinct from those of the land hunters.
• The Selk'nam are a mixture. The authors modelled them as about 64% (63.8 ± 9.2%) Aónikenk related ancestry, from the mainland guanaco hunters, and 36% ancestry related to the Yámana, with a mixture dated to roughly 1,900 years ago.
• The Haush are a second mixture. They carry between 10 and 45% Yámana related ancestry depending on the individual, with mixing around 1,300 years ago. The whole region formed a chain of neighbours who exchanged partners from about 2,200 to 1,200 years ago, before the flow slowed down.
• Small populations. Genetic diversity was as low as in the least diverse peoples living today, the signature of populations that remained small for a very long time.
• Uniparental markers. All the men belonged to the Native American Y chromosome lineage Q1a2a. All mitochondrial lineages were from haplogroups C and D, with D1g5 and C1c more frequent in northern Tierra del Fuego and C1b in the Beagle Channel.

The picture is that of a people who arrived from the mainland, where their closest relatives were the Aónikenk, and who over many centuries took in partners from the canoe people of the south. The Selk'nam were not an isolated relic, but the result of a long history of contact on an island that had been cut off from the continent since rising seas flooded the Strait of Magellan at the end of the Ice Age.

What our Global25 analysis can and cannot see

We gathered every Fuegian and Patagonian genome available in Global25 coordinates: five pre-contact Selk'nam from northern Tierra del Fuego, two Selk'nam who lived around 1850, six Haush, nine Yámana from several periods, four Kawésqar, one Aónikenk and several older hunter-gatherers. We ran three tests. The results are honest, and two of them are a warning.

1. No European ancestry, even in the generation of the genocide

The two Selk'nam dated to around 1850 lived as sheep ranches, missions and gold seekers reached the island. Did they already carry European ancestry? We modelled each of them as a mixture of the pre-contact Selk'nam average and modern Spaniards. These two sources are very far apart (distance 0.687, condition number 3.3), so the test is sensitive.

To know what zero looks like, we first ran the same model on twelve people buried long before colonisation. They come out between 0 and 2.1%, the highest values in the genomes with the lowest coverage. Then we added known quantities of Spanish ancestry to the pre-contact Selk'nam: a 3% spike in is read back as 1.8 to 5.1%, while a 2% spike in is partly lost in the noise. Our honest detection floor is therefore about 3%.

Both Selk'nam of the 1850s fall below this floor: 0.8% for MA577 and 0% for I8576. The same is true of six Yámana who lived between about 1770 and 1890. Whatever their contacts with sailors, sealers and missionaries, their parents and grandparents were Fuegians. The admixture that so many Chileans and Argentines carry today came later, mostly after the destruction of the old way of life.

2. Global25 barely sees the differences between Native Americans

Global25 is built from the genetic variation of the whole world, and most of its 25 dimensions describe differences among Eurasian and African populations. Native Americans, who descend from a small founding population, are squeezed into a tiny corner of that space. The consequence is easy to measure.

Two Selk'nam from the same cemetery are on average 0.033 apart. The Selk'nam average is only 0.014 from Ceramic Age people of Curaçao, in the Caribbean, and 0.016 from the Classic Maya of Chichén Itzá, about as close as it is to its Yámana and Haush neighbours. The Fuegian peoples come out slightly closer to each other than to the more distant Kawésqar and Aónikenk, which agrees with the published picture, but the differences are of the same size as the noise. For comparison, modern Spaniards are at 0.687, more than forty times further away.

3. The published 64/36 model cannot be reproduced

We then tried to rebuild the model of Nakatsuka and colleagues: Selk'nam as a mixture of Aónikenk and Yámana. The two sources are only 0.026 apart, less than the distance between two Selk'nam individuals, and the condition number of the model is 48. In plain words, the two "ingredients" are almost the same vector.

This is a collinearity trap, and we prefer to show it rather than hide it. The qpAdm models of the original study use hundreds of thousands of SNPs and outgroup statistics that capture the small amounts of drift shared between neighbours. Global25 averages that information away. For the fine structure of Tierra del Fuego, the published estimates are the reference; our NNLS figures should not be quoted.

4. A warning for Chilean and Argentine readers

Many readers in Chile and Argentina run their own Global25 coordinates and ask whether they carry Selk'nam ancestry. To show what can happen, we modelled several Native American populations as a mixture of Spaniards, an ancient population of Central Chile (Conchalí, 700 BP) and the Selk'nam. None of the targets except possibly the southern Mapuche can carry Selk'nam ancestry in reality.

The Mixe of Oaxaca come out 86% "Selk'nam", the Ceramic Age inhabitants of Curaçao 70%, and the Classic Maya 56%. The modern Mapuche Huilliche of southern Chile get 38%, a figure that looks plausible and is just as meaningless as the others. If an online calculator gives you a precise Selk'nam, Yámana or Kawésqar percentage, the number tells you that you have Native American ancestry. It cannot tell you which Native American people it came from.

What remains

The genomes of the Selk'nam tell of a people whose ancestors came down from mainland Patagonia, settled the island, and over thousands of years shared partners with the canoe people of the south. They were tall, but not giants. They lived lightly on a cold land, in guanaco capes and painted skins, until a sheep economy decided that the land was worth more without them.

Their story did not end with Ángela Loij. It continues in the families who carry their blood, in the recordings of Lola Kiepja's songs, in Gusinde's photographs of the Hain spirits, and in a handful of ancient genomes that, despite the limits of our tools, still carry the memory of thousands of years at the end of the world.

Methods note

All coordinates are Global25 scaled coordinates. Population averages were taken in priority from the Global25 ancient averages, then the Global25 modern averages, then the Moriopoulos 2026 collection; individual Fuegian genomes from the Global25 individual file. Scale compatibility was checked by comparing the mean of the five individual pre-contact Selk'nam with the Moriopoulos Argentina_Selknam_500BP average (distance 0.005). Two Haush genomes and one Kawésqar genome with coverage below 12% were excluded from averages. NNLS fits use a sum to one constraint applied as a weighted extra equation (weight 1000), followed by normalisation. European ancestry: source separation 0.687, condition number 3.3; background from twelve pre-contact Selk'nam, Haush and Yámana genomes (0 to 2.1%, with a leave one out Selk'nam source for the Selk'nam); spike in tests at 1, 2, 3 and 5% Spanish_Castilla_Y_Leon. Aónikenk and Yámana model: separation 0.026, condition number 48 (Yámana source: the four capture genomes, dated AD 460 to 1890); with all nine Yámana genomes the condition number is 54 and the Aónikenk share drops to 13%. Haush model: separation 0.016, condition number 76. Three source model of Figure 4: condition number 71.8. Dates, haplogroups and qpAdm estimates are taken from Nakatsuka et al. (2020) and are not recomputed here.

Global25 coordinates used in this article

The pre-contact and nineteenth century Selk'nam genomes, their average, and the averages of their neighbours used as sources. They can be pasted directly into the Vahaduo tool.

Selknam_NorthTierradelFuego_I12354,0.052359,-0.317861,0.119924,0.096577,-0.117560,-0.020917,-0.297523,-0.354908,-0.020043,-0.014761,-0.008769,-0.000450,0.001189,0.024359,-0.010993,0.006364,0.010170,-0.002534,-0.009804,-0.000875,0.000250,-0.002349,-0.003204,-0.002048,-0.002634
Selknam_NorthTierradelFuego_I12363,0.054635,-0.320907,0.112382,0.097546,-0.115098,-0.015897,-0.294703,-0.357447,-0.019430,-0.012028,-0.005846,0.001499,0.001933,0.015827,-0.009365,0.007823,0.004694,-0.000380,-0.000880,-0.001126,-0.005615,0.000000,0.000246,0.004940,-0.007185
Selknam_NorthTierradelFuego_I12364,0.063741,-0.317861,0.115776,0.095608,-0.125870,-0.021475,-0.278958,-0.336217,-0.013294,-0.006743,-0.000487,0.008243,-0.005203,0.016102,-0.002850,0.000796,0.010952,0.003547,-0.005405,0.006628,0.006239,-0.001237,0.001725,-0.003735,0.003113
Selknam_NorthTierradelFuego_I12366,0.056912,-0.318876,0.117662,0.097546,-0.116329,-0.019522,-0.296348,-0.353754,-0.011044,-0.023144,0.002111,-0.002997,0.001338,0.021607,-0.004479,0.005436,0.009779,0.000380,-0.001508,-0.002626,-0.002496,0.002473,-0.005423,-0.000602,0.007065
Selknam_NorthTierradelFuego_I12367,0.059188,-0.315830,0.115022,0.096900,-0.120638,-0.026216,-0.281543,-0.341524,-0.019634,-0.012392,-0.010230,-0.000749,-0.005500,0.030552,-0.002850,0.003050,0.002738,0.002154,-0.007165,0.001501,-0.003743,0.005193,-0.010969,0.002048,-0.005987
Selknam_c1850_MA577,0.055773,-0.307705,0.115022,0.104006,-0.111405,-0.014502,-0.294703,-0.349601,-0.013499,-0.015308,0.005196,-0.003147,0.001933,0.024222,-0.004750,0.006895,0.008605,-0.000380,-0.006913,-0.001251,-0.002496,0.003957,-0.006902,0.000482,-0.006227
Selknam_c1850_I8576,0.047806,-0.314814,0.121433,0.096254,-0.123408,-0.019801,-0.289298,-0.349832,-0.016362,-0.013668,-0.004384,-0.002398,0.005203,0.023809,0.000000,0.007955,0.007823,0.003294,-0.006662,0.006503,-0.001622,-0.001237,-0.003697,-0.004579,-0.000958
Selknam_precontact_average_n5,0.057367,-0.318267,0.116153,0.096835,-0.119099,-0.020805,-0.289815,-0.348770,-0.016689,-0.013814,-0.004644,0.001109,-0.001249,0.021689,-0.006107,0.004694,0.007667,0.000633,-0.004952,0.000700,-0.001073,0.000816,-0.003525,0.000121,-0.001126
Haush_MitrePeninsula_average_n4,0.051790,-0.319638,0.120961,0.094962,-0.119253,-0.024054,-0.292999,-0.349370,-0.013856,-0.013805,-0.000690,0.001761,0.002936,0.021366,-0.004717,0.005071,0.006585,-0.002566,0.003048,0.004002,-0.004586,0.000866,-0.003451,-0.002380,-0.000599
Yamana_BeagleChannel_average_n4,0.055489,-0.320654,0.118510,0.096577,-0.114791,-0.022451,-0.294703,-0.349139,-0.011402,-0.015217,0.000934,-0.000674,0.000780,0.023362,-0.001629,0.004541,0.001466,-0.005131,-0.004242,0.002501,-0.002901,0.002040,-0.005608,0.000482,-0.005688
Kawesqar_average_n3,0.055773,-0.311429,0.113513,0.095285,-0.101968,-0.015990,-0.283501,-0.347524,-0.013362,-0.015186,-0.000325,-0.000300,-0.000842,0.027066,-0.007419,0.006541,0.003042,-0.000802,-0.002975,0.003752,-0.001955,-0.000041,-0.006162,0.001727,-0.002555
Aonikenk_I8575,0.055773,-0.317861,0.121056,0.087533,-0.123100,-0.023427,-0.297758,-0.356985,-0.015135,-0.015490,-0.002923,0.003447,0.000595,0.022157,-0.002307,0.012729,0.001304,0.006588,-0.004022,0.000500,0.005116,0.007172,-0.003821,0.008676,-0.007424
Chile_Conchali_700BP_average_n2,0.055204,-0.316337,0.118227,0.090278,-0.118483,-0.019243,-0.294115,-0.352600,-0.010635,-0.020410,0.000487,-0.001199,0.000520,0.024084,-0.008347,0.000994,0.009909,0.000697,0.000000,0.002251,-0.001373,0.004637,-0.004437,0.001084,0.000120
Spanish_Castilla_Y_Leon,0.107753,0.143867,0.040477,-0.002153,0.043803,0.001859,-0.001723,0.004615,0.028429,0.029218,-0.002328,0.007843,-0.012091,-0.012019,0.012260,-0.006541,-0.006780,-0.001731,-0.004525,-0.002293,0.000291,-0.000907,0.001315,-0.002571,-0.002754

References

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3. Stature Béguelin M (2011). Stature estimation in a central Patagonian prehispanic population: development of new models considering specific body proportions. International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 21(2): 150 to 158. doi.org/10.1002/oa.1117
4. Anthropometry Cocilovo JA, Varela HH, Valdano SG (2019). Hurgando en el arcón de los tiempos perdidos en los confines de la ecúmene. Las etnias selk'nam, yámana y halakwulup según el registro somatométrico de Martín Gusinde. Intersecciones en Antropología 20(1). redalyc.org
5. Ethnography Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino. Selk'nam: economy, social organisation and art. chileprecolombino.cl
6. History Selk'nam genocide: overview of the sources, bounties, the Seguel inquiry and population counts. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selk'nam_genocide
7. History Case Western Reserve University. "Cannibals" in Paris: the Selk'nam of Tierra del Fuego at the 1889 Universal Exhibition. case.edu
8. Biography Ángela Loij (c. 1900 to 1974). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ángela_Loij
9. Biography Lola Kiepja (c. 1874 to 1966) and the Selk'nam chants recorded by Anne Chapman. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lola_Kiepja
10. Legend Patagons: the European legend of the Patagonian giants, from Pigafetta to Byron. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patagons
11. Data Global25 PCA coordinates by Davidski, and the Moriopoulos 2026 collection of Global25 coordinates.