Posted on Saturday 6 January 2007

There are many things that are contentious in American paleontology but one thing that is generally accepted is that humans starting living in the Americas no later than 11,500 years ago. The earliest uncontested sites are those of the Clovis people, a culture whose characteristically fluted arrow tips can be found in thick profusion in archaeological sites scattered across both North and South America. While there is tantalizing evidence of much earlier settlements, the best preserved being at Cactus Hill in Virginia and at Monte Verde in Chile, the latter yielding dates which may go back as far as 33,000 years, the evidence for pre-Clovis settlement still has some way to go before being accepted as mainstream.

But that point aside, even with the Clovis people plenty of mystery remains. Who were the Clovis people and where did they come from? The answers to those questions are not as straightforward as they once seemed.

He was about 175 cm tall, a vigorous middle-aged man who for years had carried a spear point lodged in his hip, apparently without ill effect

He had a long face, a long low brain pan, a prominent nose and other skull measurements that distinguished him from most, if not all, of the modern world's distinct human populations.

He bore no resemblance to any modern American Indian, and some scientists have suggested that he was more Caucasoid than Asian. This possibility has made him perhaps the most celebrated and controversial skeleton ever found in North America. [link]

The conventional theory has it that the Clovis migrated into the Americas from Siberia via a land-bridge across the Bering strait some time after the glacial maximum which was 14,000 years ago. This theory is based on a notion first put forward by a Jesuit missionary Fray José de Acosta (Historia Natural y Moral de las Indias) in 1590 when he suggested that "small groups of savage hunters" may have traveled overland from Asia to America many thousands of years ago (the Bering strait, incidentally, was not discovered until 1823).

Again, the late discoveries of Captain Cook, coasting from Kamchatka to California, have proved that if the two continents of Asia and America be separated at all, it is only by a narrow strait. So that from this side also, inhabitants May have passed into America; and the resemblance between the Indians of America and the eastern inhabitants of Asia, would induce us to conjecture, that the former are the descendants of the latter, or the latter of the former; excepting indeed the Esquimaux, who, from the same circumstance of resemblance, and from identity of language, must be derived from the Greenlanders, and these probably from some of the northern parts of the old continent.

[Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia. 1782]

There is no doubt that the land-bridge did exist and that it was (at least theoretically) usable for migration at various times between glacial maxima and there is also certainly a strong physical resemblance between modern Native Americans and modern North-East Asians however it is a curious fact that there have been no Clovis sites found in Alaska and that the cultural artifacts found in Siberia for the same period differ significantly from the Clovis ones.

Finding human remains of this antiquity is even rarer in the Americas than finding tools and camp sites but of the few skeletons that have been found that date to over 8,000 years old, another curious fact emerges: only one (found at Wizard's Beach in Nevada) has facial features that resemble those of modern Native Americans or for that matter North-East Asians.

Instead, these skulls have been variously described as resembling South Asians, Australian Aborigines, Polynesians, Africans and even Europeans. Skeletons with more familiarly Native American characteristics do not start showing up much before 7,000 years ago, more than a millennium after the end of the Clovis period. This implies that the original makeup of the American population was far more diverse than had originally been thought and that there may have been several immigration events which occurred at various times, some after the land-bridge route was inundated and some possibly very much earlier. The most likely scenario for these migrations being via a coastal route in boats rather than overland by foot.

It's worth recalling at this point that the demographic make up of Asia has been in a state of constant flux as well so it really should not be too surprising to see people's of quite different backgrounds washing up on American shores. Recently, research into the settlement pattern for the Indian subcontinent, South-East Asia and Australia has demonstrated that modern humans from Africa started migrating eastwards more than 60,000 years ago using boats which hugged the coastline. Within 10,000 years they had reached Australia and New Guinea and negotiating 250 km of open sea to get there. It is likely that this early migration pattern continued up the Chinese coast and as far as Japan and it is an exciting possibility that these early people also arrived in the Americas, migrating down the full length of both continents and contribution to the genetic stock which would one day create the Clovis culture.

Specimen from Baja California Sur Courtesy: Rolando González-José

Skulls point to varied origins for first Americans

The ancestry of the first Americans may be more complex than anthropologists thought.

Researchers studied 33 ancient skulls excavated in Mexico. They say unlike other early American remains, the artifacts resemble those of people from south Asia and the southern Pacific Rim.

Rolando González-José of the University of Barcelona and his colleagues took detailed measurements of skulls from an extinct tribe.

The skulls were excavated at the tip of the Baja California Peninsula in Mexico. The study appears in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.

The researchers conclude the skulls' features appear more Paleoamerican than those of the Paleoindians, thought to be direct ancestors of present-day Native Americans.

"Surprisingly, the craniofacial features of these Baja Paleoamericans skulls have similar long and narrow braincases and relatively short, narrow faces, implying a common ancestry with the inhabitants of south Asia and the Pacific Rim," wrote anthropology researcher Tom Dillehay in a commentary accompanying the study.


[link]

It's important to realise here that this "extinct tribe", the Pericu (and its neighbouring tribe the Guaycuras) only died out a few hundred years ago and only after contact with white colonizers. Furthermore, similarities have been noted between the Baja Indians and the natives of Tierra del Fuego, a people who have largely abandoned their traditional way of life but are still very much with us.

Esotericism of the Popol Vuh [the holy book of the Maya civilization]

Survivals of that archaic form of culture still persist on this continent and, as might be expected, are found in areas of refuge where they were preserved by farming peoples. Populations which retain a high degree of "First-Age" characteristics, as described by the native sources, live in Baja California as well as on the islands of Tierra del Fuego at the southernmost extreme. Both populations display notable similarities, and in terms of nature and physique appear to be the oldest and most primitive people of the hemisphere. Baja California is or was peopled by the Yumas, Guaícuris, and Pericu; and the Seri – now confined to an island in the Sea of Cortez. All of them belong to the primitive hunter cycle and, excepting the Yumas, are dolichocephalic. They have a very primitive type of physique, like the Tierra del Fuego Indians of the extreme south and the Botocudos of Brazil. Like their remote ancestors, the Fuego Indians, whom W. Krickeberg regards as direct descendants of the oldest immigrants (W. Krickeberg, Etnología de América, Mexico, 1946, Spanish-language edition), preserve a religion based on the purest monotheism and have almost no ritual acts. They have neither tribal organization nor institution of chiefs, living in nomadic hordes of two or three families, small consanguinal patrilineal groups. They produce neither pottery nor weaving and live by hunting and fishing, feeding on mollusks, fish, birds, and seals. A piece of sealskin covers the shoulders of the men and serves as an apron for the women (A. D'Orbigny, L'Homme Américain , Paris, 1839). They do not know the fire drill, employing instead two stones and tinder, a very primitive method still used by the Chortí, particularly in connection with the interment of the dead. In the south of Patagonia in former times caves were used for habitations as well as for burials, as W. Krickeberg notes; and the same author indicates that estimates based on archaeological remains and island middens show that the Fuegians have lived in that region for at least two thousand years, their culture undergoing very little modification during that time. These data tend to confirm the cultural stability as well as the great ethnological age of those people.

[link]

"Luzia" of Brazil


A skull belonging to a roughly 20 year old woman was unearthed in Brazil by the French archaeologist Annette Amperaire in 1971. She died before before being able to do any work on her dicovery. The skull was later "re-discovered" on a museum shelf by Brazilian Prof. Walter Neves and recognized for what it was. In a brilliant popularization of his find, he named the ancient lady "Luzia" (in analogy to the famous and much older African "Lucy") - the press and a wider public could not be troubled with the skull's official designation "Lapa Vermelha IV Hominid 1".

The face of "Luzia" was reconstructed using modern forensic methods and its morphology painstakingly analyzed by craniometric measurements. The reconstruction brought to light and and the measurements confirmed that "Luzia" was not a mongoloid Amerindian but had features indicating a possibly Australoid or southeast Asian ancestry. When it was dated to around 11,500 to 12,500 years ago (the oldest human remains found so far in the Americas), the sensation was perfect.

Since Luzia's discovery, at least 50 similarly un-mongoloid Palaeoamerican remains have been found in the Lagoa Santa area near where "Luzia" herself was found. They all seem to have been buried within a small area that may have been a cemetery. This rises the intriguing question of whether the Lagoa Santa population at this early time was perhaps already settled in a specific area and perhaps even no longer just hunter-gatherers. There are a lot of unanswered questions about the Lagoa Santa people that cry out for further research.


[link]

How did a European arrive in America 9,000 years ago?

Bid to clear up the Kennewick mystery
Tests to be carried out in the next few days may shed light on the mystery of the Kennewick man.
[In 1996] an apparently European skeleton was found near Kennewick, Washington State, in the western United States - a discovery that sparked a bitter clash between archaeologists and native Americans.

The scientists want to examine the bones to look for clues to where the ancient traveller came from, but native Americans consider this disrespectful to one of their ancestors and want to re-bury the remains.

However the Kennewick Man skeleton prompts a particularly awkward question - what was an apparently European man doing in North America over 9,000 years ago?

Conventional wisdom has it that Vikings may have reached North America around 1,000 AD, but archaeologists hope the remains would tell them more about the spread of humans across the Americas.

[link]

Kennewick Man's "caucasian"-ness has since been discounted as it has been recognized that large noses and a long faces are not exclusive characteristics of Europeans but can also be found in other Asian racial groups. An examination of the skull's dental pattern demonstrated a possible affinity with South Asians.

While it seems likely that there were several waves of migration into the Americas from Asia, the one made by North-East Asians, seemingly the last and perhaps the largest in terms of population, has prompted some commentators to interpret this in terms of a population replacement and one which entailed the mass extermination of the original inhabitants over the length and breadth of two continents.
This strikes me more as a case of overkill in theoretical terms than in reality. Undoubtedly there were violent encounters as the new arrivals competed for the same resources as the locals. This always happens with human populations but to me a far more likely pattern than genocide over the course of thousands of years would have been conflict, accommodation and ultimately assimilation. There are a number of genetic differences between Native Americans and North East Asians and some of these point to a diverse genetic inheritance.

So while it is true that we are:

Slowly... realizing that the ancestry of the Americas is as complex and as difficult to trace as that of other human lineages around the world.

It does not necessarily follow that:

not all early American populations were directly related to present-day Native Americans.

That is, assuming that, say, Kennewick Man had left any descendants at all that are alive today (and it is worth noting here that he had been properly buried after his death by someone who cared enough to do so) then it is practically certain that all Native Americans alive today are his descendants. Furthermore, a high percentage of the black and white communities living today in the Americas could also legitimately claim him as their ancestor¹.

As James Chatters, the only archeologist to have examined the Kennewick Man skeleton, puts it:

No matter how long we might study the Kennewick man we would never know the form or color of his eyes, skin and hair, whether his hair was curly or straight, his lips thin or full – in short many of the characteristics by which we judge living peoples' racial affiliation. We will never be certain if his wound was by accident or intent, what language he spoke, or his religious beliefs. We cannot know if he is truly anyone's ancestor. Given the millennia since he lived, he may be sire to none or all of us.

1 - ancestor: This is because of a suprising effect, well-known amongst genealogists, that as you go back far enough in time you start to run out of individual ancestors. For each generation the number of ancestors you need to take account of doubles but at the same time, generally speaking, these ancestors are being drawn from a smaller and smaller population. Taking a biblical example, if we traced our ancestry back to 4004 BC, that's 240 generations, we would all have 2 raised to the power of 12016 ancestors and half of them would be called Adam and the other half, Eve.

If we speak only of Europeans, one only has to go back about 400 years before you can say with quite a reasonable degree of certainty that if an individual living back then had any descendants that are alive today then all Europeans living today are also descendants of that person.

In a nutshell, it seems everyone is descended from Charlemagne.