Paleoamericans
Posted on Saturday 6 January 2007 to unknown
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.
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.
"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.
