The analysis of the skull concludes that the Americas were colonized by more than one wave of migrants
Has there ever been a more exciting adventure than when humans dispersed all over the world with their primitive tools and not as much as a hand-drawn map? A new study of cranial forms of prehistoric people shows that it is possible that there were several migrations of Asians and possibly of Australian or Polynesian people who undertook this great trip to the Americas thousands of years ago.
The researchers' paper says that the prehistoric morphology of the human skull of the first South Americans resembles more Polynesian or Australasian peoples. They write that cranial forms can fill gaps that scientists could never close with gene and DNA studies.
There is a controversial debate between anthropologists and Native Americans about whether there was a migration to the Americas through the land bridge of the Bering Strait between Alaska and northeastern Russia many thousands of years ago. That land bridge has been under water for millennia. Some researchers say that the people of a large mass migration were the ancestors of all natives of the Americas.
Rare bones and DNA of young children surprise scientists, support ideas about migration to the Americas 11,000 years ago
Did the Paleoamericans arrive in South America first?
Many natives deny this theory and say that people came to what they call Turtle Island from many places. This new research supports his point of view.
The map shows the location of the contemporary population and the Paleo-American sample of Santa Lake in Brazil. (Noreen von Cramon-Taubadel, Andre Strauss and Mark Hubbe) This latest research was conducted by anthropologists Noreen von Cramon-Taubadel, Andre Strauss and Mark Hubbe and published by the journal Science Advances. His position is that people came to South America from more than one place and / or from several migrations through Beringia. The team used geometric morphometric imaging processes to create three-dimensional images of some skulls from the Lagoa Santa region in Brazil. It is estimated that these skulls date from about 7,000 to 10,000 years ago, approximately at the time of the arrival of people in South America.
The large differences in the shape of the skull of the modern native South Americans indicate one of the two possibilities, the authors write. The first is that the skull shapes vary greatly as a result of genetic drift or common selection that acts in small isolated populations.
The other proposed central hypothesis is that the observed cranial diversity is the result of multiple waves of dispersion in the Americas from northeastern Asia over the course of several thousand years, with each wave of migrants introducing new sources of biological diversity. This argument is based largely on the empirical observation that the average cranial shape of the first South Americans has stronger affinities with the populations of Australasia and Polynesia than with the groups of natives of East Asia or later
The authors point out that South America was the last continent populated by humans, but the cranial differentiation of these people is unusually high in relation to people from other continents.
The researchers wrote in their report that the nature and timing of the colonization of the Americas is subject to a long-term banter.
It is now clear that people entered America from northeastern Asia through Beringia at least 15,000 years ago, and dispersion in South America occurred quickly, probably following a Pacific coastal route," they wrote. "A genetic distinction has been observed between the South American and western populations of the South, specifically with respect to a signal of australomelanian descent in the eastern populations (of the Amazon), which is consistent with our cranial findings, which suggest a history population in layers for South America, with at least two main sources of biological variation in Asia.
The first migrants in the Americas were very different from later people in their morphology. Researchers say that the flow of qualities between the first migrants and later peoples may have been a factor in their assimilation about 11,000 years ago or during the Holocene.
They write that because the relevant genomic data are not available for many questions about human prehistory, cranial data may be the best option to draw conclusions about the past
A map of the flow of qualities in and out of Beringia, according to 2007 data on haplogroups of human mitochondrial DNA. The colors of the arrows correspond to the approximate time of the events and are decoded in the colored time bar.
Without ban, and when they arrived during what must have been a wild adventure, the original inhabitants of the Americas were hunter-gatherers who developed different cultural, linguistic and architectural achievements, many of which were eliminated by the Europeans who followed them.