A study of skulls excavated from the tip of
Baja California in
Mexico suggests that the first
Americans may not have been the ancestors of today's
Amerindians, but another people who came from
Southeast Asia and the southern
Pacific area.
The question of who colonized the
Americas, and when, has long been hotly debated. Traditionally,
Native Americans are believed to have descended from northeast
Asia, arriving over a land bridge between
Siberia and
Alaska some
12,000 years ago and then migrating across
North and South America.
But recent research, including the Baja California study, indicates that the initial settlement of the continent was instead driven by
Southeast Asians who occupied
Australia 60,
000 years ago and then expanded into the Americas about 13,
500 years ago, prior to
Mongoloid people arriving from northeast Asia.
The skulls from Baja California, which may date back only a few hundred years, have slender-looking faces that are different from the broad-cheeked craniums of modern Amerindians, the descendants of the Mongoloid people.
"Our results change the traditional idea that all modern Amerindians present morphological affinities with
East Asians as a result of a single migration," said
Rolando González-José of the
University of Barcelona,
Spain, who led the study. "The settlement of the
New World is better explained by considering a continuous influx of people from Asia."
The new study is reported in this week's issue of the science journal
Nature, and could further fuel the controversy surrounding the origins of the first Americans, which is a controversial issue for
American Indians in particular.
Challenging
Clovis
Conventional wisdom says that Native Americans descended from prehistoric hunters who walked from northeast Asia across a land bridge, formed at the end of the
Ice Age, to Alaska some 12,000 years ago. American Indians resemble the people of
Mongolia,
China and Siberia
.
In the 1930s, archeologists found stone spear points among the bones of mammoths near
Clovis, New Mexico.
Radio carbon dating in the
1950s showed that the oldest site was 11,
400 years old. The sites were assumed, for years, to be the first evidence of human occupation in the Americas.
But more recent discoveries challenge the Clovis story. In
1996, archeologists in southern
Chile found weapons and tools dating back 12,500 years. In
Brazil, they found some of the oldest human remains in the Americas, among them a skeleton—named
Luzia—that is more than 11,000 years old.
Luzia did not look like American Indians.
Instead, her facial features matched most closely with the native
Aborigines in
Australia. These people date back to about 60,000 years and were themselves descended from the first humans who probably originated in
Africa.
The researchers believe Luzia was part of a people, referred to as "Paleoamericans," who migrated into the Americas—possibly even by boat—long before the Mongoloid people. These Paleoamericans may later have been wiped out by or interbred with Mongoloids invading from the north.
- published: 18 Aug 2013
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