Oldest Skulls in The Americas are Black and not Asian origin
- Ishmael Bey
- Apr 22, 2021
- 1 min read
Updated: Jul 2, 2022
Comparative morphological studies of the earliest human skeletons of the New World have shown that, whereas late prehistoric, recent, and present Native Americans tend to exhibit a cranial morphology similar to late and modern Northern Asians (short and wide neurocrania; high, orthognatic and broad faces; and relatively high and narrow orbits and noses), the earliest South Americans tend to be more similar to present Australians, Melanesians, and Sub-Saharan Africans
Abstract
Comparative morphological studies of the earliest human skeletons of the New World have shown that, whereas late prehistoric, recent, and present Native Americans tend to exhibit a cranial morphology similar to late and modern Northern Asians (short and wide neurocrania; high, orthognatic and broad faces; and relatively high and narrow orbits and noses), the earliest South Americans tend to be more similar to present Australians, Melanesians, and Sub-Saharan Africans (narrow and long neurocrania; prognatic, low faces; and relatively low and broad orbits and noses). However, most of the previous studies of early American human remains were based on small cranial samples. Herein we compare the largest sample of early American skulls ever studied (81 skulls of the Lagoa Santa region) with worldwide data sets representing global morphological variation in humans, through three different multivariate analyses. The results obtained from all multivariate analyses confirm a close morphological affinity between SouthAmerican Paleoindians and extant Australo-Melanesians groups, supporting the hypothesis that two distinct biological populations could have colonized the New World in the Pleistocene/Holocene transition. https://www.pnas.org/content/102/51/18309#:~:text=Comparative%20morphological%20studies%20of%20the,orthognatic%20and%20broad%20faces%3B%20and
After Walter Neves introduced his two-migration model in 2005 based on cranial morphology from Lagoa Santa, the evidence quickly shifted against him. In 2009, Rolando González-José et al., “Discrepancy between Cranial and DNA Data of Early Americans: Implications for American Peopling,” PLOS One, used quantitative genetic modeling to show that cranial variation could arise from drift or plasticity within one Beringian population, aligning with mitochondrial and Y-chromosome data and undercutting the Australoid migration argument. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0005746. In 2010, S. Ivan Perez et al., “Testing Evolutionary and Dispersion Scenarios for the Settlement of the New World,” PLOS One, confirmed this with multivariate statistics, directly countering Neves’s reliance on morphology. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0011105.
In 2013, Walter A. Neves et al., “Early Human Occupation of Lagoa…
Ishmael Bey, your article repeats a long-debunked claim that the oldest skulls in the Americas prove that the first Americans were Black or Australoid rather than Asian. You cite comparative morphology from Lagoa Santa to argue this point, but that interpretation was overtaken by genetic evidence more than a decade ago.
The Lagoa Santa skulls, including Luzia, do show dolichocephalic forms that Walter Neves once compared to Australo-Melanesians and Africans. In 2005 he proposed a two-migration model to explain these differences. The problem is that this was based only on cranial measurements, with no DNA evidence. As González-José and Perez demonstrated in 2009 and 2010, cranial variation can emerge within a single Beringian-derived population through drift and plasticity. Morphological resemblance…