Walter Neves has done some good work in this area. I'll post some of his work as this thread progresses.
Aha! A link!
Crikey.
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This report emphasizes that this research could not have been done in the United States, because of the PC restrictions imposed by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Note also that the Bush Administration continues to back the anti-science Clinton Administration position on taking Kennewick Man back from the scientists and giving him to the Indians for reburial, even though he wasn't an Indian.
From The Economist print edition
HOW and when did people first get to America? This is one of the most controversial topics in archaeology. A new analysis of 33 skulls from Baja California, by Rolando González-José of the University of Barcelona, and his collaborators, supports a recent theory that the first Americans were descended from southern Asians rather than Siberians, as had earlier been supposed. The ancestors of these “paleoamericans” are thought to have lived in southern Asia at least 40,000 years ago. Their descendants arrived on the American continent around 15,000 years ago, after “coasting” for generations round the northern Pacific (they coasted south too, according to this theory, and were also the ancestors of Australia's aboriginal population). They thus arrived before the ancestors of modern Amerindians, who crossed the Bering Straits 12,000 years ago.
The paleoamericans appear to have died out. There is no sign of them today. The question is: when did this happen? Up to now, the assumption has been: a long time ago. But Dr González-José begs to differ. The skulls he examined, thought to be from the Pericú tribal group, who were hunter-gatherers living near the southern tip of the Baja peninsula in early historic times, are a mere 2,000 years old. Yet they seem to be paleoamerican.
Although the skulls, stored at the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City and at the Regional Anthropological Museum of La Paz, were discovered over the course of the past three decades, Dr González-José's analysis, reported in this week's Nature, is the first to examine their geometry.
The researchers used two methods to analyse the skulls. The first employed 24 of the variables enumerated by William Howells, an archaeologist at Harvard who pioneered the statistical analysis of skulls in the 1970s. These variables include the length of the skull, the length of the face, and the width of the eye sockets. By comparing these measurements with those of known paleoamerican skulls, and of other populations, ancient and modern, Dr González-José inferred that the Pericú skulls are most similar to those of paleoamericans. The results of this analysis agreed with those from the more cutting-edge technique of “geometric morphometrics”, a computerised curve-fitting technique based on 14 points on the skull. Both methods link the paleoamericans to southern Asians and Pacific islanders, and likewise link modern-day Amerindians to Siberians.
Fortunately, by working in Mexico, Dr González-José's team did not meet with the difficulties currently plaguing archaeologists in the United States. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, passed in 1990, has made it hard to study ancient skeletons found within the United States. It gives control of such discoveries to Amerindian tribes living in the area in which they are made, on the assumption that such old bones may have belonged to ancestors of people in these tribes. Only if the tribes agree are scientists allowed to study them.
Unfortunately, the law has been abused to stop the study of skeletons so old (and so physically unlike local inhabitants) that they could not possibly be ancestral to modern local people. Most famously, this has resulted in a seven-year court battle over Kennewick Man, a 9,400-year-old skeleton that has Caucasian rather than Amerindian features, and was found in Washington state. Though the scientists prevailed in August last year, the American government, which is supporting the claims of local tribes, has filed an appeal. The latest hearings, due on September 10th, may decide whether Kennewick Man will be allowed to shed any light on the debate that Dr González-José has just so elegantly illuminated.