A team of paleoanthropologists report in PLoS One analyzed the skulls of several dozen 11,000 year old Paleoamericans and compared them to the skulls of more than 300 1,000 year old Amerindians. They concluded that based on the morphology, there were two distinct waves of colonizers from Asia.
11,000 Year Old Lagoa Santa Brazil Paleoamerican Skull
While we know from a couple genetic studies there are at least two, if not 3 or more waves of colonizers, the morphological evidence is now beginning to make a lot more sense along with the genetic evidence. There’s some concern why the authors didn’t have more North American and Asian samples for comparison, but that’s almost always a critique in any anatomical study.
Two comments in the Science Now news article are particularly entertaining regarding this topic:
“Very interesting–don’t tell some of the tribes in california–they won’t be able to handle real information like this.”
“Exactly. It sounds like the Amerindians stole the land from the Paleoindians? I guess they should pay restitution, right?”
- Hubbe, M., Neves, W., & Harvati, K. (2010). Testing Evolutionary and Dispersion Scenarios for the Settlement of the New World PLoS ONE, 5 (6) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0011105
8 Comments
June 26, 2010 at 10:19 am
I’ve found your article on various migrations into the Americas most interesting. As usual, it raises more questions in my mind than it answers. One of my favorites is the constantly changing “mother culture” of the Americas. As I recall, there was some question about the ethnicity of the Chachapoya vs. other native “indians”. I know this question arises periodically ref the Olmec (african? phillipino? ??).
Thank you.
Joe Santoni
June 30, 2010 at 11:00 am
Well, it seems that (again) the anthropometrical analysis of skulls are probably wrong: a new paper by Perego et al., expands part of the mitochondrial genetic data of Native Americans appears to resolve the matter in favor of a single colonization most likely, a colonization that expanded from Alaska to the South Cone in less than one thousand years, somewhere between 15 and 18 Ka. ago.
I briefly discuss it here.
June 30, 2010 at 5:38 pm
[...] and Dispersion Scenarios for the Settlement of the New World by Hubbe et al, was discussed on Anthropology.net, Softpedia and [...]
July 10, 2010 at 9:21 am
If you scholars know anyone who’s looking for articles to study from directly about South Texas culture visit http://thew0lf.wordpress.com/ I live in South Texas and most of my text is focused on the issues here in South Texas. Issues such as drugs, or the situation a lot of Mexican immigrants face when they get university degrees in their home country and come across only to find out their degree is of no value. Language barrier, sexual behavior, religion of south texas. This area is really interesting and has so much history that I hope more people start studying about it.
August 4, 2010 at 11:31 pm
Thanks for the massive link-bombing. Really added so much quality to the conversation. Seriously, keep up the excellent commenting…
July 13, 2010 at 12:27 pm
As far as proof for multiple immigrations to the Americas is concerned, language can also be considered as well as genetics and morphological analyzation. I believe there are two distinct language families in the Americas that cannot be well related to each other. These could have evolved from the languages from two waves of people immigrating to the Americas.
August 19, 2010 at 1:58 pm
[...] and Dispersion Scenarios for the Settlement of the New World by Hubbe et al, was discussed on Anthropology.net, Softpedia and [...]
September 1, 2010 at 8:11 pm
That quote is rather unsettling