Neves and Pucciarelli's paper on affinities between Australians and Paleoindians

As promised, in this post I share a link to a paper by Neves and Pucciarelli (Neves, W.A. and Pucciarelli, H.M. (1991). Morphogical affinities of the first Americans: an exploratory analysis based on early South American human remains. J. Hum. Evol. 21: 261-273).

It tells how they compared the remains of three ancient South American remains (from Tequendama in Colombia, and Lagoa Santa in Brazil) with ancient and contemporary Eurasian and Australian remains. They used thirteen different cranial parameters in their analysis.

This was in the days before DNA was used to compare human groups. Neat and interesting. I thank Marcelo Bruyere for having shared the paper.

I have uploaded it to one of my websites: here.

The authors point out that "The comparison showed that early South Americans clustered very tightly with South Pacific populations, when size and shape were used as taxonomical criteria. When size was removed, the three series occupied an intermediate position".

And conclude that:

"the morphological affinities derived from our study can be perfectly matched to an Asian origin if we assume that Australians and Americans shared a common ancestor until just before they arrived at the New World. Accordingly, both branches, the one that migrated northwards and the one that migrated southwards, did not have a long, independent evolutionary history in northern and southern Asia prior to their settlement in the Americas and Australia. At least not enough to have changed their cranial morphology. If we accept the association detected in this study between Early South Americans, Early Australians and the Zhoukoudian Upper Cave people, Northern China can be suggested as the starting point of both migration branches."

So the remains from the upper Zhoukoudian Cave, which are between 20 and 30,000 years old would belong to a group which is the root of the first wave of Paleoindians and Australians.

It is possible, in my opinion, that this date could even be earlier, considering the date that humans reached Australia (some 50-70 ky ago).

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