All,
Recently brought to my attention by Robert Henvell, the following article provides us with a pretty straightforward and parsimonious statement regarding the overall palaeoanthropological status of the first human dispersals into the New World.
Neves, Walter A., Mark Hubbe, Maria Mercedes M. Okumura, Rolando Gonzalez-José, Levy Figuti, Sabine Eggers, and Paulo Antonio Dantas De Blasis. 2005. A new early Holocene human skeleton from Brazil: implications for the settlement of the New World. Journal of Human Evolution (online).
Abstract:
Increasing skeletal evidence from the U.S.A., Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil strongly suggests that the first settlers in the Americas had a cranial morphology distinct from that displayed by most late and modern Native Americans [Jantz, R.L., Owsley, D.W., 2003. Reply to Van Vark et al.: is European Upper Paleolithic cranial morphology a useful analogy for early Americans? Am. J. Phys. Anthropol. 121, 185e188; Steele, D.G., Powell, J.F., 1992. The peopling of the Americas: the paleobiological evidence. Hum. Biol. 63, 301e336; Neves, W.A., Prous, A., Gonza´ lez-Jose´ , R., Kipnis, R., Powell, J., 2003. Human skeletal remains from Santana do Riacho I, Brazil: archeological background, chronological context and comparative cranial morphology. J. Hum. Evol. 45, 759e782]. The Paleoamerican morphological pattern is more generalized and can be seen today among Africans, Australians, and Melanesians. Here, we present the results of a comparative morphological assessment of a late Paleoindian/early archaic specimen from Capelinha Burial II, southern Brazil. The Capelinha skull was compared with samples of four Paleoindian groups from South and Central America and worldwide modern groups from W.W. Howells’ studies. In both analyses performed (classical morphometrics and geometric morphometrics), the results show a clear association between Capelinha Burial II and the Paleoindians, as well as Australians, Melanesians, and Africans, confirming its Paleoamerican status.
Keywords:
Settlement of the Americas; Craniometrics; Riverine shellmidden
And here are the last paragraphs of the conclusion:
The increasing evidence that all late Pleistocene/ early Holocene human groups from South America are characteristically non-Mongoloid has major implications for the colonization of the Americas, as argued by one of us (WAN) since the end of the 1980s. Even if few studies with large samples from single sites have been carried out so far with Paleoindians (see Neves et al., 2003, 2004, as examples of these studies), it is evident by now that South America Central America and possibly North America, were populated by human groups with a more generalized cranial morphology before the arrival of the Mongoloids. Since this more generalized morphology (‘‘Australo-Melanesian- like’’) was also present in East Asia at the end of the Pleistocene, transoceanic migrations are not necessary to explain our findings.
As presented in detail elsewhere (Neves et al., 2003) the arrival of an ‘‘Australo-Melanesian-like’’ population in the Americas is easily accommodated under what is presently known about the place of origin and the routes taken by modern humans in their first long-distance dispersions (Lahr and Foley, 1998). Accordingly, a population that began to expand from Africa around 70 ka reached southeast Asia by the middle of the late Pleistocene, carrying with it a cranial morphology characterized by long, narrow neurocrania and narrow, projecting faces. We postulate that after reaching southeast Asia, this stem population gave rise to at least two di•erent dispersions. One took a southward direction and arrived at Australia around 50 Ka. Sometime between 50 and 20 Ka a second branch dispersed towards the north, and arrived in the Americas by the end of the Pleistocene, bringing with it the same cranial morphology that characterized the first modern humans. When the classical Mongoloid cranial morphology appeared in northeastern Asia, either as a local response to extreme environmental conditions, or as the product of a migration from northern Europe, a new expansion of northern Asians reached the New World, bringing with it a cranial morphology characterized by short, wide neurocrania and broad, retracted faces.
Although local microevolutionary processes in the Americas can not be precluded to explain the transition from a generalized to a very specialized cranial morphology (Powell and Neves, 1999), a model based on the entrance of two different morphological patterns from the Old World is much more parsimonious. As recently demonstrated by Roseman (2004), significant changes in cranial morphology are much less frequent than previously expected. As such, cranial morphology has much to say about human evolutionary history.
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HERE for the full article.
Jacques Cinq-Mars
