Skulls shed new light on migration to Americas

[Little95]

Skulls shed new light on migration to Americas
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/ID/10441210

By Bjorn Carey

Updated: 5:39 p.m. ET Dec. 12, 2005

For decades it has been believed that the first peoples to populate
North
and South America crossed over from Siberia by way of the Bering Strait
on a
land-ice bridge.

However, a new study examining the largest collection of South American
skulls ever assembled suggests that a different population may have
crossed
the bridge to the New World 3,000 years before those Siberians.

Scientists occasionally discover skulls in South America that look more
like
those belonging to indigenous Australians and Melanesians than Northern
Asians, but researchers tend to regard these skulls as anomalies due to
natural variation rather than a norm, mainly because there were too few
to
study.

Now scientists have compared 81 skulls from the Lagoa Santa region of
Brazil
to worldwide data on human variation.

While the skulls of Native Americans and Northern Asians — the
descendents
of the early Siberian settlers — generally feature short, wide
craniums, a
broader face and high, narrow eye sockets and noses, this collection
was
remarkably different.

The skulls belonging to the earliest known South Americans — or
Paleo-Indians — had long, narrow craniums, projecting jaws and low,
broad
eye sockets and noses. Drastically different from American Indians,
these
skulls appear more similar to modern Australians, Melanesians and
sub-Saharan Africans.

This indicates that these skulls — which date to between 7,500 and
11,000
years ago — were not merely anomalies but rather were the majority,
supporting the hypothesis that two distinct populations colonized the
Americas.

People with skulls resembling Paleo-Indians were present in Asia around
20,000 years ago, and lacking the technology to cross the Pacific Ocean
by
boat, they probably crossed the land bridge to Alaska several thousand
years
before the Siberians, said study co-author Mark Hubbe of the
Universidade de
São Paulo.

“We don’t know for sure, but we believe at least 3,000 years earlier,�
Hubbe
told LiveScience. “We have a difference of 3,000 years in South
America, and
we can assume the difference is the same in North America.�

The research was published online this week by the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences and will appear in the Dec. 20 issue of
the
journal.

[Tehuti-4]

Can someone say IVAN VAN SERTIMA ??

[Moorbey]

Yt is now just coming clean on something that Ivan Van Sertima has been saying for years now.