Posted on 03/08/2006 3:09:40 PM PST by xcamel
OK, You pick: Depiction by a renowned forensic scientist,
or hideous, androgenous, mix-mash cartoon, pandering to the unrelated Northwest Natives?
IMHO: Time should be ashamed. (not that it would ever happen, mind you.)
It is totally different from the Time reconstruction.
Look at the meeting of the bridge of the nose and the brow ridges. They are separated by a depression in the skull and in the scientific recreation of the head. They run together into the forehead in the Time nonsense.
Paleo-Celt....:)
I read a little of that article. The scientist interviewed claims he never said Kennewick Man was a caucasian, only that he had cuacasian-like features. Also said that a more detailed study of the skull revealed features more similar to those of northern Japanesse Ainu. Later in the article, it says the current theory about the origin of Indians is that they arrived by boat, not a land bridge.
-Years- ago when Kennewick man first surfaced, he was definitely IDed as "Caucasian".
Then the hysteria began as the 'native americans' sought to bury him in secrecy before further tests could be done.
Back then, Googling "Kennewick man" brought up hundreds of pages about him.
Now, you can hardly find much of anything.
It's as though the "political correctness" squad has purged history already.
I VCRed the first show about KM way back then, and the scientists and forensic artist -all- said he was defintely Caucasoid.
That's apparently been "revised" by parties and methods unknown.
Well said.
FYI...
Comment?
James Chatters, the paleoanthropologist who did all the early work on Kennewick Man never called him a Caucasian. His first impression on seeing the skull was that he was dealing with an European pilgrim to the area but, after further evaluation he realized he had an ancient skeleton that displayed some Causoid characteristics.
KM still has those characteristics and is believed to be related in part to the Ainu/Jomon people of Northern Japan who are tall, light skinned, hairy and have some Causiod like features. He is not an European.
I just completed reading a good book last night by J.M. Adovasio (he excavated the Meadowcroft Site), titled: The First Americans. He said the Corps Of Engineers 'securing' of the KM site was equlivent to the Taliban blowing up the Buddhist statues in Afghanistan.
The cranial reconstruction on the Time cover is pretty bad. The area between the eyes (nasion notch if I remember back a few years) is different, but look at the chin! Look at the overall nasal breadth.
The Time cover has a forehead which slopes at a different angle than the cranium. The medial brow ridges are very different. Its hard to see in these illustrations, but the degree of round headedness also looks different and that is a major point.
The base of the jaw (gonia) appear wide on the cranium, but the Time illusration suggests much less of this, but the other reconstruction shows it well.
I would love to sit down with that skull for a few hours in a well-stocked bone lab! First thing I would check is the thickness of the frontal bone.
By Steve Connor Science Editor
03 December 2002
Scientists in Britain have identified the oldest skeleton ever found on the American continent in a discovery that raises fresh questions about the accepted theory of how the first people arrived in the New World. The skeleton's perfectly preserved skull belonged to a 26-year-old woman who died during the last ice age on the edge of a giant prehistoric lake which once formed around an area now occupied by the sprawling suburbs of Mexico City.
Scientists from Liverpool's John Moores University and Oxford's Research Laboratory of Archaeology have dated the skull to about 13,000 years old, making it 2,000 years older than the previous record for the continent's oldest human remains. However, the most intriguing aspect of the skull is that it is long and narrow and typically Caucasian in appearance, like the heads of white, western Europeans today. Modern-day native Americans, however, have short, wide skulls that are typical of their Mongoloid ancestors who are known to have crossed into America from Asia on an ice-age land bridge that had formed across the Bering Strait.
The extreme age of Peñon woman suggests two scenarios. Either there was a much earlier migration of Caucasian-like people with long, narrow skulls across the Bering Strait and that these people were later replaced by a subsequent migration of Mongoloid people. Alternatively, and more controversially, a group of Stone Age people from Europe made the perilous sea journey across the Atlantic Ocean many thousands of years before Columbus or the Vikings.
Silvia Gonzalez, a Mexican-born archaeologist working at John Moores University and the leader of the research team, accepted yesterday that her discovery lends weight to the highly contentious idea that the first Americans may have actually been Europeans. "At the moment it points to that as being likely. They were definitely not Mongoloid in appearance. They were from somewhere else. As to whether they were European, at this point in time we cannot say 'no'," Dr. Gonzalez said.
The skull and the almost-complete skeleton of Peñon woman was actually unearthed in 1959 and was thought to be no older than about 5,000 years. It formed part of a collection of 27 early humans in the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City that had not been accurately dated using the most modern techniques.
"The museum knew that the remains were of significant historical value but they hadn't been scientifically dated," Dr Gonzalez said. "I decided to analyse small bone samples from five skeletons using the latest carbon dating techniques. I think everyone was amazed at how old they were," she said.
Robert Hedges, the director of Oxford's Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, who also dated the age of the Turin shroud, carried out the radiocarbon analysis, which is accurate to within 50 years.
"We are absolutely, 100 per cent sure that this is the date," Dr. Gonzalez said. The study has been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication next year in the journal Human Evolution.
At 13,000 years old, Peñon woman would have lived at a time when there was a vast, shallow lake in the Basin of Mexico, a naturally enclosed high plain around today's Mexico City, which would have been cooler and much wetter than it is today. Huge mammals would have roamed the region's grasslands, such as the world's largest mammoths with 12-foot tusks, bear-sized giant sloths, armadillos as big as a car and fearsome carnivores such as the sabre-toothed tiger and great black bear. The bones of Peñon woman, named after the "little heel" of land that would have jutted into the ancient lake, were well developed and healthy, showing no signs of malnutrition. Dr Gonzalez found that the two oldest skulls analysed were both dolichocephalic, meaning that they were long and narrow-headed. The younger ones were short and broad * brachycephalic * which are typical of today's native Americans and their Mongoloid ancestors from Asia.
The findings have a resonance with the skull and skeleton of Kennewick man, who was unearthed in 1996 in the Columbia River at the town of Kennewick in Washington state. The skull, estimated to be 8,400 years old, is also long and narrow and typically Caucasian.
James Chatters, one of the first anthropologists to study Kennewick man before it had been properly dated, even thought that the man may have been a European trapper who had met a sudden death sometime in the early 19th century. Kennewick man became the most controversial figure in American anthropology when native tribes living in the region claimed that, as an ancestor, his remains should be returned to them under a 1990 law that gave special protection to the graves and remains of indigenous Americans. The debate intensified after some anthropologists suggested that
Kennewick man was Caucasian in origin and could not therefore be a direct ancestor of the native Americans living in the Kennewick area today. Dr Gonzalez said that the identification of Peñon woman as the oldest known inhabitant of the American continent throws fresh light on the controversy over who actually owns the ancient remains of long-dead Americans.
"My research could have implications for the ancient burial rights of North American Indians because it's quite possible that dolichocephalic man existed in North America well before the native Indians," she said. But even more controversial is the suggestion that Peñon woman could be a descendant of Stone Age Europeans who had crossed the ice-fringed Atlantic some 15,000 or 20,000 years ago.
This theory first surfaced when archaeologists found flint blades and spear points in America that bore a remarkable similarity to those fashioned by the Solutrean people of south-western France who lived about 20,000 years ago, when the ice age was at its most extreme. The Solutreans were the technologists of their day, inventing such things as the eyed needle and the heat treatment of flint to make it easier to flake into tools. They also built boats and fished.
Bruce Bradley, an American archaeologist and an expert in flint technology, believes that the Solutrean method of fashioning flints into two-sided blades matches perfectly the Stone Age flint blades found at some sites in American. One of these is the 11,500-year-old flint spear point found in 1933 at Clovis, New Mexico. Dr Bradley said that the flint blades that came into America with the early Asian migrants were totally different in concept and mode of manufacture. Both the Clovis point and the Solutrean flints shared features that could only mean a shared origin, according to Dr. Bradley. Studies of the DNA of native Americans clearly indicated a link with modern-day Asians, supporting the idea of a mass migration across the Bering land bridge. But one DNA study also pointed to at least some shared features with Europeans that could only have derived from a relatively recent common ancestor who lived perhaps 15,000 years ago, the time of the Solutreans.
Not every specialist, however, is convinced of the apparently mounting evidence of an early European migration. "I personally haven't found it very convincing," Professor Chris Stringer, the head of human origins at the Natural History Museum in London, said. "For a start, there are lots of examples in archaeology where various artefacts from different parts of the world can end up looking similar even though they have different origins," he said. "Most humans in the world at that time were long headed and it doesn't surprise me that Peñon woman at 13,000 years old is also long headed."
Nevertheless, the remarkable age of the young Paleolithic woman who died by an ancient lake in Mexico some 13,000 years ago has once again stirred the controversy over the most extraordinary migration in human history.
Spirit Cave Man
(The oldest mummy ever found in the Americas)
Addendum to my post #9.
No Europeans. That's a journalists' fantasy.
"European-like" is a term often used for the Ainu of northern Japan. It relates to more hair, lighter skin color, and longer, narrower cranium. These physical features do not indicate descent.
The current "Early Coastal Migration" theory suggests that the earliest west coast folks arrived by boat. Later folks came over the land bridge as has been theorized for a century or more.
This still leaves open the question of the origin of haplogroup X, which might have been even earlier (see Oppenheimer's nice website with the moving lines).
There should be a lot more on this in the near future. The theoretical dam has been broken and data is flowing at a good clip.
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I dunno why you white guys get so excited about this. You still won't be able to have your own casino.
Seriously. I'm probably more Indian than you but not enough to cash in on the casinos. They have to vote you in.
My great-great-grandmother was Blackfoot, but that isn't enough for me to check the "Native American" box.
The Indians became hysterical and started to sue.
An Asatru organization jumped in to claim the body on behalf of Europeans.
The media went berserk saying that anyone associated with Asatru was a racist and therefor anyone suggesting he was caucasian was a racist.
He was then found to be neither but rather an Ainu
The Ainu issue bothers me for a couple of different reasons. The timing of the "neither" discovery, the question of the origin of the Ainu, and a study by a Japanese researcher that found Y-chromosome links "to the Black Sea region" in what he believed to be the purest possible Ainu which was completed years before Kennewick man was found (this research is one of the things that has apparently rather oddly disappeared from the web in recent years).
My husband also had a great, great, grandmother who was native American married to a French Canadian trapper. She may have been Cree. He grew up in Iowa, and his mother never told him until a few years before he died. She was ashamed. I probably have a little Mongolian Tartar from my Prussian German ancestry. Our one son is very dark haired, dark eyed and slightly olive skinned. He was at a museum once and said he really thought he looked a lot like the Crees. Our other son has medium brown hair, very dark eyes, high cheekbones, and somewhat almond eyes. He had a slight epicantic fold as a baby. He is also dyslexic like his father. Now, in a recent thread I discover that my husband may also have Neanderthal ancestry, with his bright red hair, freckles, clear blue eyes, hairy body, short legs, long strong torso, big bones, heavy brow ridges, warrior temperment, and Scots ancestry. I wonder what his mother would have thought of that? Isn't genetics fun, can't wait for the new scientific developments.
Regarding dolicocephalic heads, there is an interesting nutrition factor. Head shape can be influenced by nutrition factors, Adelle Davis, "Let's Have Healthy Children". When number 1 son was a baby he had a broad full head. After age 1 his head began to narrow like mine, but not his red head father. Then I read in the book that this is a sign of Vitamin D deficiency. I started giving him cod liver oil and his head gradually became rounder again. Vitamin D is formed by sun in oils on the skin, then absorbed into the body where it affects bone formation. If it was more cloudy in the period around 13kya, or if more clothes were worn the fact that more skulls were dolicocephalic may not have been racial, but environmental. I believe that in ice age times it was drier (less cloudy) people might have been less likely to wash the skin oils off in the cold, ergo, brachycephaly.
When I was a kid, everyone knew of the "West Virginia Giants" skeletons that had been unearthed during coal mining operations nearly a hundred years ago.
They were Caucasoid men nearly 7 feet tall.
You'll not find many references to them anywhere, now.
This was all I could turn up;
http://community-2.webtv.net/@HH!0A!7D!A2D7750B8D4A/AncientArts/WorldGiants/
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