The skull of Luzia, possibly the oldest skeleton in the Americas, who has facial features distinctive of Australian Aborigines.
Credit: Marco Fernandes/COSMOS
SYDNEY: Cranial features distinctive to Australian Aborigines are present in hundreds of skulls that have been uncovered in Central and South America, some dating back to over 11,000 years ago.
Evolutionary biologist Walter Neves of the University of São Paulo, whose findings are reported in a cover story in the October/November issue of Cosmosmagazine, has examined these skeletons and recovered others, and argues that there is now a mass of evidence indicating that at least two different populations colonised the Americas.
He and colleagues in the United States, Germany and Chile argue that first population was closely related to the Australian Aborigines and arrived more than 11,000 years ago.
Cranial morphology
The second population to arrive was of humans of 'Mongoloid' appearance - a cranial morphology distinctive of people of East and North Asian origin - who entered the Americas from Siberia and founded most (if not all) modern Native American populations, he argues.
"The results suggest a clear biological affinity between the early South Americans and the South Pacific population. This association allowed for the conclusion that the Americas were occupied before the spreading of the classical Mongoloid morphology in Asia," Neves says.
Until about a decade ago, the dominant theory in American archaeology circles was that the 'Clovis people' - whose culture is defined by the stone tools they used to kill megafauna such as mammoths - was the first population to arrive in the Americas.
Clovis culture
They were thought to have crossed the Bering Strait from Siberia into Alaska at the end of the last Ice Age, some 10,000 or so years ago, following herds of megafauna across a land bridge created as water was locked up in glaciers and ice sheets.
But in the late 1990s, Neves and his colleagues re-examined a female skeleton that had been excavated in the 1970s in an extensive cave system in Central Brazil known as Lapa Vermelha.
The skeleton - along with a treasure trove of other finds - had been first unearthed by a Brazilian-French archaeological team that disbanded shortly after its leader, Annette Laming-Emperare, died suddenly. A dispute between participants kept the find barely examined for more than a decade.
The oldest female skeleton, dubbed Luzia, is between 11,000 and 11,400 years old. The dating is not exact because the material in the bones used for dating - collagen - has long since degraded; hence, only the layers of charcoal or sediment above and below the skeleton could be dated.
"We believe she is the oldest skeleton in the Americas," Neves said.
Luzia has a very projected face; her chin sits out further than her forehead, and she has a long, narrow brain case, measured from the eyes to the back of the skull; as well as a low nose and low orbits, the space where the eyes sit.
First South Americans?: Claims have arisen in a BBC documentary that Australian Aboriginals may have become the "first South Americans". The documentary is Ancient Voices, to be screened on BBC2, and a claim is based on the 12,000-year-old skull of a girl found in Brazil, plus a report that a "20,000-year-old Western Australian painting depicts an ocean-going vessel". The skull was examined by Walter Neves, professor of Biological Anthropology at University of Sao Paulo, then given to forensic artist Richard Neave at Manchester University for reconstruction work. The girl's skull did not appear to be Mongoloid, as expected, but appeared to have arisen from human stock of South-East Asian Islands, or Australia-Melanesia. Australian researchers have derided such claims. "Preposterous", said Greg Dening, adjunct professor of Australian National University, Centre for Cross-Cultural Research. Prof. John Mulvaney, author of Prehistory of Australia, said no watercraft of 12,000 years ago could have crossed the Pacific Ocean. Reported 23 August, 1999. 12,000 BP: Ice Age ends, temperatures rise, rainfall decreases, sea levels rising 1m per century 12,000BC to 9000BC: In Czechoslovakia, and Shanidar, Iraq, ceremonial burials of bodies coated in red ochre, as associated with Goddess worship. (Miles) 12,000BC: Bison are shaped from moist clay in the Tuc d'Audoubert cave of the French Pyrenees, discovered in 1912.
