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To: Varda
"I’d interpret this sentence to mean that there is no evidence of Mayan culture. This doesn’t seem to say anything about whether these might be biological ancestors."

The oldest Mongoloid skeleton ever found is only 10k years old (Oppenheimer)...there couldn't have been Mayan yet, at this early date. I was thinking maybe these guys. (Whoever they are?)

Vintage skulls

"The oldest human remains found in the Americas were recently "discovered" in the storeroom of Mexico's National Museum of Anthropology. Found in central Mexico in 1959, the five skulls were radiocarbon dated by a team of researchers from the United Kingdom and Mexico and found to be 13,000 years old. They pre-date the Clovis culture by a couple thousand years, adding to the growing evidence against the Clovis-first model for the first peopling of the Americas."

"Of additional significance is the shape of the skulls, which are described as long and narrow, very unlike those of modern Native Americans.

34 posted on 04/12/2007 5:47:43 AM PDT by blam
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To: blam
I don’t think Native americans can be classified as Mongoloid. I’ve read that a more complete study of morphology using hundreds of data points places them intermediate between Mongoloids and Caucasions. This supports the genetic evidence that they are descended from the same ancestral group as all Eurasians. Also (as you point out) the peopling of the New World occurred before the Mongoloid race evolved out of the same morphology.

“the earliest known American skeleton had its closest similarities with early Australians, Zhoukoudian Upper Cave 103, and Taforalt 18. The results obtained clearly confirm the idea that the Americas were first colonized by a generalized Homo sapiens population which inhabited East Asia in the Late Pleistocene, before the definition of the classic Mongoloid morphology.”

That's Australia, China and North Africa The “Australian” morphology seems to have been widespread at the end of the Pleistocene.

I think its a mistake to assume that people should be physically similar to very distant ancestors
“Powell has already noted (Powell 1995; Powell and Neves n.d.; Steele and Powell 1992, 1994) that the geographic groupings or races seen among modern peoples are at best fuzzy and at worst non-existent when examining late Pleistocene and early Holocene populations world-wide. “

Morphology can change drastically in isolated popluations. This has been demonstrated many times with island species. I don’t see why people would be any different.

39 posted on 04/12/2007 8:49:21 AM PDT by Varda
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