Ancestral Puebloans, the civilization from which present-day Pueblo tribes descended, emerged as early as 1500 B.C.E. in an area of what is now the southwestern United States and dispersed suddenly in the late 1200s C.E., abandoning established villages with systems for farming crops and turkeys. Recent analysis comparing turkey remains at Mesa Verde, one such village in southern Colorado, to samples from modern turkey populations in the Rio Grande Valley of north-central New Mexico determined that the latter birds descended in part from turkeys cultivated at Mesa Verde, with shared genetic markers appearing only after 1280. Thus, researchers concluded that ________ 

Which choice most logically completes the text?