Posted on 11/24/2007 11:28:47 AM PST by blam
Does skull prove that the first Americans came from Europe?
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.
Stephen H. Hull M.A.; B.A. (Hons.) Archaeological Data Management Provincial Archaeology Office Culture and Heritage Division Department of Tourism Culture and Recreation PO BOX 8700 St. John's, Newfoundland A1B 4J6 W (709) 729-0493 Fax (709) 729-0870
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Narrow skulls clue to first Americans
11:24 04 September 03
NewScientist.com news service
Skull measurements on the remains of an isolated group of people who lived at the southern tip of Mexico's Baja California has stirred up the debate on the identity of the first Americans once again.
The earliest inhabitants of North America differed subtly but significantly from modern native Americans. The difference is clearly seen in the skull shapes of the first people to colonise the continent, who had longer, narrower skulls than modern people.
One theory says it is because two distinct groups of people migrated to North America at different times. But another theory says that just one population reached the continent and then evolved different physical attributes, except for a few isolated groups.
Anthropologists once assumed the earliest Americans resembled modern native Americans. That changed with the discovery of a 10,500-year-old skeleton called Luzia in Brazil, and the 9000-year-old skeleton of Kennewick man in Washington state [and the dating of a 13,000 year old skull of a 26 year old woman called Peñon III found on the shores of Lake Texcoco in the valley of Mexico - bs].
Both had the long, narrow skulls that more resemble those of modern Australians and Africans than modern native Americans, or even the people living in northern Asia, who are thought to be native Americans' closest relatives.
Some researchers argued that they were simply unusual individuals, but scientists have now identified the same features in recent remains from the Baja California.
Desert island
The Pericú hunter-gatherers survived until just a few hundred years ago at the end of the peninsula, says Rolando González-José, of the University of Barcelona, Spain, (Nature, vol 425, p 62).
He thinks the formation of the Sonora desert isolated the Pericú for thousands of years, but they vanished when Europeans disrupted their culture. González-José measured 33 Pericú skulls and found their features were similar to those of the ancient Brazilian skulls.
This backs the idea that a first wave of long, narrow skulled people from south-east Asia colonised the Americas about 14,000 years ago. These were followed by a second wave of people from north-east Asia about 11,000 years ago, who had short skulls.
This theory has been championed by Walter Neves, at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. He says the second wave may have been larger, and eventually came to dominate the Americas. "The discovery is exactly what I have been predicting since the late 1980s," Neves told New Scientist.
However Joseph Powell, an anthropologist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, is not convinced. He thinks the earliest Americans did come from south-east Asia, but believes they evolved into modern native Americans.
"Even with two waves, each would have changed over the past 10,000 to 12,000 years through adaptation and microevolution," he says. Neves argues that the change in skull shape after 8000 years ago is too sudden for evolution.
Journal reference: Nature (vol 425, p 62)
Ahem, I see that UFO up there over that picture of Chimney Rock.
I missed that...
Worse than just mere Europeans, the Aztlan/Reconquista jerks have to face facts that the Conquistedores were simply retrieving their own ancestral birthright from invaders from China.
From about 1515 to 1648 most of the Americas were subjected to enormous and deadly plagues.
If you've ever looked over Jamestown's history you would have noticed that about 90% of the first 60,000 "settlers" died of disease within a few months of their arrival. Definitely some problems here.
The Clovis culture is the one at issue here ~ not an earlier one, nor a later one. Solutrean and Clovis technology appear to be so similar that you have to stand on your head to argue that they could possibly have different origins.
Except the West Coast Indians with the greatest incidence of “x factor” (a series of codes they have in common only with the Sa’ami and the Berbers) are, of course, the Chippewa who “look white” to a greater degree than any other Indians.
Oh, sure it was. The high number that I've ever heard for aboriginals was 6 million, which I think is a crock and irredentist propaganda.
But even if it were true it's a tiny number of people for such an enormous area.
Lots of photographs of the American West exist which predate most of the significant settlement. The land is utterly empty. As a lot of it still is. Oddly, I have never seen a picture of Aztec airports, Ute skyscrapers, or Navajo nuclear power plants. Certainly weren't in any pix I ever saw. Guess they took them all down and hid them, huh?
It was European civilization which brought the institutions and technology to make the land support far higher numbers than what was here. You can argue all you want about how Asia had such culture (only to a subsistence level); or how it might have evolved eventually here (they had about 60,000 years here....about the same as Europe. So when would it have happened?); or...or...whatever other simpering, We're-just-as-good-as-ju-damn-gringos argument you can think of....but the truth is, the Anglo-Saxon settlers brought their culture and their genetics here and that's all she wrote. The rest is undeniable.
So, when the "settlers" arrived even Mexico had up to 50,000,000 people. The Iriquois nation could command the resources of possibly 4 to 5 million. There were millions more all over the place.
Who told you the continent was empty?
Wishful thinking and nonsense.
Who told you that? Tony Villaraigosa?
Americans invented and developed those features of the modern world. Americans built the steel skyscrapers.
What Europeans and East Asians do is a pale imitation of the real thing.
Speak for yourself, sport. Not the way we see it.
...La Raza, MeCHa, and all the reconquista and "native" American groups will be deeply saddened. ...and will do their utmost to downplay the evidence.
Gee, really?
That number is commonly seen in discussions of the number of people in S America, pre-European landing.
Now, back to your theory that English speaking Europeans living in the Old World invented the skyscraper, the nuclear reactor, the airplane, the automobile, etc.
They didn't.
Elwood Haynes invented the automobile in Indiana. The Wright Brothers grew up in Indiana and invented the airplane in Ohio. Dr. Geiger invented the geiger counter in Indiana (thereby making it possible to find radioactive materials to touch off the nuclear age).
Getting real narrowly defined here, and noting that the first skyscraper was built in Chicago, I'd say that EVERYTHING worth having in the modern world was invented in a small part of the world where the dominant language was German, and it wasn't in Europe.
You guys are asking for a trip back home, if you know what I mean.
Cayley built gliders. The Wright Brothers invented the real thing ~ POWERED FLIGHT. Without them there are no airports. Without Cayley there are fewer wrecked gliders at the bottom of cliffs.
Recall that he claimed it for Mexico
You and your Arab Army gonna push us?
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