New Paper: An early peopling of Australia

Update for my Oct. 5, 2025 post, Lake Mungo man revisited: maybe the Aboriginal people were not the first to reach Australia. A study published on Nov. 28, 2025 has uncovered interesting information on the date that humans reached Australia, and their interactions with archaic humans in Southeast Asia.

The paper is Francesca Gandini et al., (2025) Genomic evidence supports the “long chronology” for the peopling of Sahul. Sci. Adv. 11, eady9493 (2025).DOI:10.1126/sciadv.ady9493

The paper explores when modern numans settled in Sahul, a landmass that spanned Australia, Tasmania, Papua New Guinea, and smaller islands on the now submerged continental shelf (under the sea since ice melted at the end of the last Ice Age). It aimed at validating the "long chronology" with an arrival around 60 to 65,000 years ago, against the "short chronology" which proposed an arrival 47 to 51,000 years ago.

The authors analyzed DNA and used a genetic clock to time the arrival, which they place around 60,000 years ago. They also found that people arrived using two entry routes.

I have expressed my doubts about the accuracy of genetic clocks in several posts (See the useless genetic clocks), but let's look into this paper and its findings.

Near Oceania was peopled early

The authors found that " We also draw Oceania together with Sahul, finding that Near Oceania was first settled at around the same time as Sahul, followed by intense ongoing exchange." This is interesting as we find that people who used watercraft were already living in Near Oceania (New Guinea, Bismarck Archipelago, and the main Solomon Islands), 60,000 years ago. And would have had plenty of time to cross the Pacific Ocean and reach America!

The molecular clock

The time is set by the exit from Africa which this paper sets by defining the age of mtDNA haplogroup L3 "the African ancestor of all non-African mitogenomes" at 73 to 89,000 years old. This date "robustly precludes any contribution to the modern non-African mitochondrial pool from earlier dispersals before 90 ka, as proposed by some researchers." Which is a limitation. The ages could actually be older, humans left Africa in different waves over the past 200 ky.

The date for Y-chromosome haplogroups is similar; the paper states that "non-African lineages diverg[ed] from ~71 (63 to 81) ka."

The paper used ADMIXTURE tools to analyze genome-wide data (see my comment on this type of tool).

The authors admit the bias and the need to "define" initial parameters by hand: "The Bayesian approach has some problems that have received little attention. In practice, it gives extremely variable outputs, such that any given rate is hard to replicate. The outcome depends on precisely which samples are included in the calibration; even with similar sets of samples, the estimated rate can be very different, and biases appear toward the ages of the predominant samples used in the calibration. Moreover, in the cases of ages in the range 40 to 80 ka, there are few calibration points... In addition to age bias, there is also a profound geographical and phylogenetic bias: Only 2 out of 12 samples used were non-European, and only Tianyuan belongs to haplogroup N. Moreover, one sample (the Iceman) was inadvertently uncalibrated, reducing its age by >12%. Although subsequent calibration attempts have been made with more samples, these have exacerbated the biases."

In the "Materials and Methods" section the phylogenetic analyses and molecular clock dating assumptions and adjustments are explained, like: "We converted mutational distances (both ML and ρ) into years using the substitution rate of about one mutation every 3624 years for the entire mitogenome and correcting for purifying selection using the calculator provided by Soares et al."

The paper suggests a "Northern Route": from Borneo to Sulawesi (Celebes), Banda Archipelago and into Western Papua, and reaching Australia via the Cape York Peninsula in Queensland. The "Southern Route" went from Java, to Sumatra, Sunda, Flores, and Timor, reaching Australia through Arnhem Land and northern Western Australia.

It also mentions archaic admixtures: "The connection of Sahul populations to Aboriginal Philippine groups is reinforced by the presence of distinctively high levels of Denisovan-related archaic-related introgression in both, possibly relating to interbreeding with Homo luzonensis, in the Philippines, and Homo floresiensis, in Wallacea, or even within Sahul itself."

I always like to focus on the oddities, the things that authors point out as "remarkable"or, in this case, "notably", it is the following:

"We also included in this analysis our Iron Age sample from Sulawesi, which carries the Papuan mitochondrial Q1l lineage, alongside 17 further genomes from ancient Wallacea, including a pre-Neolithic sample from Sulawesi (41, 42) (fig. S8). Notably, despite its clear Papuan mtDNA ancestry, the Iron Age sample was the only archaeological sample from Wallacea to carry no discernible Oceanian autosomal ancestry. This result is confirmed by PCA (fig. S9). This indicates both that ancestry from New Guinea, while ancient (41), was not ubiquitous in prehistoric Wallacea, but possibly (at least, since the spread of the Neolithic) restricted to coastal regions, and that sufficient time had elapsed for the ancestry represented by the maternal lineage to have been “washed out” of the autosomal genome in this individual."

This means that the original, Papuan mtDNA was found in an Iron Age (1700 BP) person in Sulawesi, yet it lacked the autosomal (all the other chromosomes) that would mark it as an Oceanian, it carried the input of other non-Oceanian people that diluted its ancestral autosomal DNA. This seems quite obvious since the ancestors of modern Polynesians made their way across this region in recent times, on their way to the Pacific Islands.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2025 by Austin Whittall © 

The Marquesans and their Melanesian heritage

While seeking more information about the possible early peopling of Polynesia by Melanesian people (which could have also continued their journey across the Pacific Ocean and reached America thousands of years ago, and admixed there with the Amerindians), I found some intersting information regarding the Marquesas Islands people and a link with Melanesia.

Roslyn Poignant, in her book Oceanic mythology : the myths of Polynesia, Micronesia, Melanesia, Australia, published in 1967, mentions on page 13 a similarity between Marquesans and Melanesians: "The Marquesans headband ornament of carved turtleshell overlaying pearlshell provides an important clue to the origin of the Marquesans. It bears a close resemblance to an ornament called a kapkap, found in parts of Melanesia." These Marquesan jewels are known as "uhikana". Adding that:

"The Society Islands were reached by about 200 B.C., but so were the most easterly Marquesas. Excavation in the latter islands showed that the first comers must have arrived direct from western Polynesia at a time when the culture of the area was hardly differentiated from that of Melanesia, for amongst the objects found was a carved pearlshell headdress ornament which in Melanesia is called a kapkap. This style of ornament continued to be worn by the Marquesans until last century. It has been found nowhere else in Polynesia, and the nearest place it reappears is Melanesian Santa Cruz, near the New Hebrides."

Santa Cruz is 6,000 km (3.740 mi.) from the Marshalls. This is a long journey.

The kapkaps of the Melanesians are made in the same manner as those of the Marquesas and it is "worn around the neck or on the forehead... a circular white clamshell disc overlaid with carved dark-brown turtle-shell fretwork". (Source; see also this source).

They were one of the most popular forms of jewelry among Melanesian and all of them were made the same way, by overlaying giant clam shell disks with delicate artwork carved in turtle shell. They were very common along the coast of New Guinea all the way to the Santa Cruz Islands. (Source).

Below are two kapkaps from New Ireland.

Two of the kapkaps on display from New Ireland, Papua New Guinea. Pitt Rivers Museum. Source

Below is a uhikana from the Marquesas, notice how similar the Melanesian and "Polynesian" (Marquesan) objects are!

Uhikana, Metropolitan Museum, late 1800s. Source

The headdress pictured above (known as uhikana) were part of the ceremonial clothing used by the tribal chiefs of the Southern Marquesas. In the image we can see a fiber headband with a central disk of pearl shell overlaid with turtle shell, forming a tiki star.

Melanesians

The people of Melanesia used disks on their heads, if inland, they made them from other materials. Below are some images depicting disks and headbands from this region.

Roro Woman in Papua New Guinea, 1914. Source

Samoan Chief, 1907. Source

The image below shows a Solomon Island chief with a large kapkap on his head.

Portrait of Irobaoa of Suafa, north Malaita, Solomon Islands, c.1910. wearing a kap-kap. Source

Marquesan People

The chief from the image below was portrayed during Captain James Cook's Second Voyage (1772-1775) at the island of Tahu Ata (which, when discovered in 1595 by Álvaro de Mendaña was named Santa Cristina) in the Marquesas.

Cook's account records the chief's name as Honoo (now written Honu), and their encounter took place in April 1774.

Chief Honu at Santa Christina or Tahu Ata. Southern Marquesas Islands. Source

CAPTION HERE. Copyright © 2025 by Austin Whittall

The image below, taken in 1895 in the Marquesas Islands is captioned: "Postmarked September 17, 1908. 8.8 x 13.8 cm. The figure with the white beard wearing a uhikana headband appears in other photographs by Homes, circa 1895 (Marquesan Chief of Atuona). He is adorned with a mother-of-pearl and tortoiseshell uhikana headband, as well as a titi ouoho covering his shoulders and a toke ouoho skirt also made of human hair. The second figure wears a feathered headdress. The seated figure in profile and the one on the right have tattoos."

Marquesan men, 1895 note the uhikana on the man with the white beard. Source

Below are some "Marquesan Chiefs" in an engraving published in 1871. Note the uhikana on the man on the right captioned "Marquesan Chief (see page 1049)". On that page it adds more context:

"When they wish to be considered as wearing full dress, the better class of men wear a most elaborate cap, made of fibre, feathers, and shells. First, a broad fillet is plaited from cocoa-nut fibre, so as to pass round the forehead, after the manner of a cap without d crown. On the centre of this fillet is fixed a large plate of mother-o'-pearl, decorated with carving. In the middle of this plate is fixed a smaller but similarly shaded plate of tortoise-shell, and in the middle of that a still smaller disc of pearl shell. Some headdresses have three of these ornaments, as is the case with that which is figured in the Marquesan chief on the 1046th page.
In the fillet are also fastened a number of feathers, either from the tail of the cock or from that of the tropic bird, so that when the fillet is bound on the forehead the feathers will stand upright. The feathers of the tropic bird are greatly prized by the natives, who use them for various ornaments, and display great ingenuity in procuring them. Instead of killing the birds, and so stopping the supply of feathers, they steal upon them when they are asleep, and dexterously twitch out the two long tail-feathers. In process of time the feathers grow again, and so the supply is kept up. I mention the custom because it is contrary to the recklessness respecting the future which is usually found among savages."

Marquesan men, 1895 note the uhikana on the man on the right. Source

So there is a unique link between the Marquesans, of all the different Polynesian people, on hundreds of islands spread across the Pacific, that wear a motherpearl inlaid with turtle shell jewel that is almost identical to the one used by Melanesian people in Papua New Guinea, and the Salomons. This suggests that the Melanesians reached the Marquesas Islands before the later wave that replaced them in the islands lying between the Eastern Pacific and Melanesia. Since Melanesians have been around for over 40,000 years. So they had plenty of time to move east, across the Pacific.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2025 by Austin Whittall © 

Lagoa Santa sites and remains: old and odd

As promised, this post will look into the Lagoa Santa remains from Brazil, which are very old and have some enigmatic traits.

Lagoa Santa in Brazil is a region covering over 100 km² in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais (see map further down), it comprises several sites such as Lapa da Amoreira, Lapa de Carrancas, Lapa Mortuária: Rockshelter and Cave, ("lapa" in Portuguese means "cave") Santana do Riacho, Cerca Grande 6, Cerca Grande 7, Escrivania 3, Sumidouro, Cerca Grande 2, Cerca Grande 5, Lapa do Caetano, Lapa D'Agua and the cave where "Luzia" was found: Lapa Vermelha IV.

The first excavations here were done by Peter Lund at Sumidouro Cave (1842). Over the years amateur archaeologists dug the caves searching for bones, and their antiquity was clear because they were found close to megafauna bones in the same sedimentary deposits. [2]

In 1956 W. Hurt and O. Blasi conducted the first professional digs in the area. They managed to date some of their excavations to some 9,720 and 9,028 years before present (BP) at Rock Shelter 6. This was very important as it gave them a Late Pleistocene - Early Holocene age.

Over 250 skeletons have been unearthed in Lagoa Santa since Lunds days.

A breakthrough was the escavation at Lapa Vermelha IV cave in 1975, by Annette Laming-Emperaire who discovered the remains of a female who was named "Luzia" (the name is a homage to Lucy, the Australopithecus afarensis found in Africa in 1974, 3.2 million-years-old).

Luzia, buried under 12 meters of sediments inside the rock shelter was dated [1] using charcoal samples found near her skull. They gave an age of 11,243–11,710 cal BP.

This makes Luzia one of the oldest Paleoindian skeletons found to date in the American continent.

Lagoa Santa Skulls have Australo-Melanesian features

Walter Neves (1999) [3] studied the "Lapa Vermelha IV Hominid 1", or "Luzia" and found that she "exhibited an undisputed morphological affinity firstly with Africans and secondly with South Pacific populations. In the second comparison, 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."

So her first similarity is with Africans followed by South Pacific people. This is relevant as we will see later.

Six years later he and Hubbe (2005) [2] expanded their sample side and studied 81 skulls recovered from Lagoa Santa and compared them with those of other extant groups using multivariate analysis. They found that: (bold font is mine)

"The results obtained from all multivariate analyses confirm a close morphological affinity between SouthAmerican Paleoindians and extant Australo-Melanesians groups, supporting the hypothesis that two distinct biological populations could have colonized the New World in the Pleistocene/Holocene transition.
...
The three different quantitative analyses undertaken in this study demonstrate that the first South Americans exhibit a cranial morphology that is very different from late and modern Northeastern Asians and Amerindians (short and wide neurocrania; high, orthognatic faces; and relatively high and narrow orbits and noses) but very similar to present Australians/Melanesians and Africans, especially with the former (narrow and long neurocrania; prognatic, low faces; and relatively low and broad orbits and noses). Taking into account the large number of early specimens used in this study, this trend is unlikely to be a result of sample bias. The phenomenon cannot, as well, be said to represent the result of microevolutionary processes restricted to Lagoa Santa because the same cranial pattern has already been described in places as distant and as ecologically different as Southern Chile [Magellan's Strait], Colombia [Sabana de Bogotá], Mexico [Mexico Basin and Baja California], United States [Florida], and elsewhere in Brazil [Bahia and São Paulo]"

So this seems to confirm his initial finding, an Australian / Melanesian - African affinity and this led to the now controversial craniofacial reconstruction of Luzia:

Luzia's skull and face reconstruction

We will cite Neto, Valle and Santos (2010) [4] whose paper "The colour of the bones: scientific narratives and cultural appropriations of 'Luzia', a prehistoric skull from Brazil", looked into the impact of the subjective bias that scientists invariably have:

"the BBC in London, looking to make a documentary on the prehistoric occupation of the Americas, funded a craniofacial reconstruction of the specimen in 1998, undertaken by Richard Neave of the University of Manchester in England. Luzia's skull was mapped using computerized tomography in Brazil and the images sent to Manchester. There a replica of the skull was produced in resin over which the face was reconstructed using red-brown modelling clay. This reconstruction generated a face suggesting a visual similarity between Luzia and the appearance of populations of African origin."

You can judge this reconstruction by yourself, please take a good look at the image below:

Luzia's craniofacial reconstruction by R. Neave. BBC

Quite controversial indeed, Luzia as depicted in that reconstruction looks like an African or even an Australian Aboriginal or a Melanesian person.

But there were more skulls at Lagoa Santa, and one team led by A. Strauss (2015), [5] studied one belonged to a person who had been decapitated. Yes, this man was is the oldest decapitation known in the New World.

Another Lagoa Santa facial reconstruction

A. Strauss and his team studied the man of Lapa do Santo, Burial 26, whose head had been chopped off 8540+/-50 14C BP. (There are plenty of photos of the site and the skull in the paper [5]).

They too compared it to other human groups and found that (bold is mine):

"The DFA also show similar results for both size and shape, and size corrected analyses (S4 Table). When either posterior probabilities or typicalities are taken into account, Burial 26 classifies clearly with Australia, which has been shown in the past to share high morphological affinities with Early South Americans. Yet, interestingly, in none of the analyses Burial 26 appear close to the other Lagoa Santa remains. When typicalities are taken into account, in both analyses, Burial 26 is statistically different (p<0.05) from Lagoa Santa’s centroid. However, these results may be influenced in this case by the reduced number of individuals in the Lagoa Santa sample, which is probably biasing the population estimates in these analyses.
The results do not indicate Burial 26 from Lapa do Santo presents a distinct morphology compared to other specimens from the Lagoa Santa region, thus supporting the notion he was a local individual and not an outsider."

Again we come across a similarity with Australians, and some remarks that it is "not close to" other Lagoa Santa skulls but isn't exactly different either (they looked into this to discard the possibility of the Lagoa Santa people beheading a prisoner from some other tribe or group).

One of the team's members, Caroline Wilkinson, a specialist in forensic reconstruction, at the John Moores University in Liverpool, England, and a "disciple of Neave" conducted a facial reconstruction of this skull [6].

She worked on a digital model fo the skull, and the outcome is quite different from Luzia.

Strauss explains: "Even though we are used to the traditional facial reconstruction of Luzia, with strong African features, this new image reflects in a more precise manner, the appearance of the first inhabitants of Brazil, displaying generalized and undifferentiated features, from which, over thousands of years, the great Amerindian diversity was established." [6]

What Strauss is saying is that the Lagoa Santa people left Asia before those that stayed behind acquired their current "Asian" features, and once in America evolved into the current Amerindian features.

Below is this new facial reconstruction, which could be that of a modern European, Indian or Middle Eastern person. Eurasian features. The flat nose and the African features are absent.

Lagoa Santa, Lapa do Santo, Burial 26 man, facial reconstruction. C. Wilkinson.

Genetics of the Lagoa Santa people

Bones are interesting, but DNA comparisons are also revealing. A study on Central and Southern American populations (C. Posth. et al., 2018) [7] compared ancient remains in Asia and the Americas, North and South. Posth's paper mentions two rare genetic variants in the Lagoa Santa genome:

1. Y chromosome haplogroup: "our observation of the currently extremely rare C2b haplogroup at Lapa do Santo disproves the suggestion that it was introduced after 6,000 BP".

C2B is extremely rare in modern and recent Amerindians. In fact, it is so rare that a late arrival to America (after all the other groups had settled the continent) had been suggested to explain this odd situation.

But the Lapa do Santo individual carried this haplogroup, and he died more than 6,000 years ago.

2. EDAR gene Variant.: "Our data show that a variant in EDAR that affects tooth shape, hair follicles and thickness, sweat, and mammary gland ductal branching and that occurs at nearly 100% frequency in present day Native Americans and East Asians was not fixed in USR1, Anzick-1, a Brazil LapaDoSanto 9600 BP individual and a Brazil Laranjal 6700 BP individual, all of whom carry the ancestral allele. Thus, the derived allele rose in frequency in parallel in both East Asians and in Native Americans."

This is interesting, the Lapa do Santo individual carried the ancestral allele for the EDAR gene, so he reached America before the mutated form (the "derived" alelle EDAR V370A) evolved.

The derived EDAR is found in 100% of contemporary Native Americans and East Asians but was not present in Lagoa Santa, Anzick Montana (12,000 years ago) or in USR1 (Upward Sun River, Alaska) 11,500 BP.

Posth concludes that the derived EDAR was not yet fixed at that time and that it evolved later, in some kind of convergent evolution on both sides of the Pacific.

Then we have the issue of the "Polynesian mtDNA" among the Botocudo people in Brazil, considered the descendants of the Lagoa Santa Paleoindians:

Botocudos with Polynesian mtDNA

Goncalves, et al., (2013) [8] studied the cranial masures of different groups of extant and past American Natives. They concluded that "the Botocudo Indians presented sufficient similarities with the Lagoa Santa Paleoamericans to be considered candidates to be their possible descendants".

There is nothing odd in this finding, the probem is that when they analyzed the mtDNA of Botocudo skulls they found that they had a haplogroup that is found on the other side of the world!:

"[they had a ] sequence as belonging to haplogroup B4a1a1a (32–34). This haplogroup is found at high frequency in Polynesia, Micronesia, parts of Near Oceania, and Easter Island".

How could these genes find their way into Brazil? Goncalves' team put forward three explanations: (1) Slave trade from Africa brought Madagascar / Polynesian / Melanesian people into Brazil. (2) Slave trade from Polynesia (enslaved Polynesians) into South America -such as what happened to the Easter Island people, forcibly taken to South America and (3) the Botocudo got the genes from their Lagoa Santa ancestors who supposedly carried this haplogroup (no papers have reported it though).

We will look into their comments on the third explanation:

"[This] scenario, prehistoric, is related to the possibility of genetic continuity between the Paleoamericans from Lagoa Santa and Botocudo Indians, which indeed originally had motivated this study. It is conceivable that the Lagoa Santa Paleoamericans carried ancient mtDNA sequences related to those of modern Polynesians, possibly because of a contact with their ancestors, and passed them on to early Amerindians, along with genes associated with Paleoamerican skull morphology.
...
However, for this scenario to be acceptable it has to be chronologically compatible with what is known about the evolutionary history of the mtDNA "Polynesian motif" (14022G, 16217C, 16247G, 16261T), which has been associated with the Austronesian expansion and settlement of Polynesia and Micronesia at a time scale more recent than peopling of the Americas. Notably, the Polynesian motif has additionally been found in Indonesian populations at low frequencies and also in Madagascar.
Polynesian islands were apparently populated around 3,000 y ago. Nevertheless, the time to the most recent common ancestor (TMRCA) for the Polynesian motif in Papuans and Polynesians was calculated as 9,300 +/- 2,000 y before present... These TMRCA dates for the Polynesian motif appear too recent for having been introduced into the Americas by the Paleoamerindian migration. Still, we cannot rule out this possibility—however improbable—because, as pointed out by Friedlander et al., the variances of these coalescence estimates may be greater than generally acknowledged."

In my opinion, the link across the Pacific via Lagoa Santa people seems to weak. The likely explanation lies with hypothesis (1) or (2): slave trade.

Nevertheless, Strauss, Neves et al. (2015) [9] reached the same conclusion: Botocudos descend from Lagoa Santa people. But they couldn't explain the Polynesian DNA found in the former:

"In conclusion, our analyses of the morphological affinities of the Botocudo Indians within a worldwide context support the hypothesis proposed by Lacerda and Peixoto (1876) that these groups from East-Central Brazil retained the same morphological pattern from the early inhabitants from Lagoa Santa
....
From a morphological point of view, our results fit better a scenario where the Botocudo are biological descendants from early Paleoamerican groups (e.g., Lagoa Santa), who share they last common ancestor with Polynesian groups probably in Southeast Asia, before the morphological differentiation that resulted in the present-day morphological pattern seen in Asia and most of the Americas occurred.
However, this scenario fails to shed light on the origin of the Polynesian DNA lineages found in the two Botocudo specimens collected from Rio Doce."

Last but not least, is the skull with prominent brow ridges unearthed by Walters in 1958 at Lagoa Santa, reported by Owen B. Beattie and Alan L. Bryan in 1984 [10] (they were trying to recover them, assuming that they had been sold to some private collector).

I had written about this skull in my post Diprothomo and Lagoa Santa - Homo erectus?, back in 2011, because those heavy supraorbital ridges looked very primitive to me:

Image : Skullcap from Lagoa Santa. Beattie and Bryan (1984) [10]

Harold Victor Walter published his findings in a book "Arqueologia Da Regiao de Lagoa Santa, Minas Gerais. Indios Pre-colombianos Dos Abrigos-rochedos. (Archaeology of the Lagoa Santa Region.)" in Portuguese and English in 1958. Did he mention this skull?

Summary

And that is all for now. Lagoa Santa sites are very interesting because they have produced hundreds of skeletal remains of Paleo Indians older than 6,000 years BP. Some have very rare genetic haplogroups. They seem to be linked to an early East Asian - Australian - Melanesian people which lived before the typical East Asian and Amerindian features evolved.

Their purported descendants, the Botocudo people of Brazil carry genetic markers found in Polynesia (an area peopled long after America), so this raises interesting questions too.

Last but not least, the emblematic skull of Luzia, depicted with African features in a facial reconstruction is quite different from the reconstruction of another Lagoa Santa skull, which has a more neutral Eurasian appearance.

Sources

[1] Michel Fontugne, (2013), New Radiocarbon Ages of Luzia Woman, Lapa Vermelha IV Site, Lagoa Santa, Minas Gerais, Brazil. Volume 55, Issue 3 (Proceedings of the 21st International Radiocarbon Conference (Part 2 of 2)) 2013 , pp. 1187-1190. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033822200048098P
[2] Neves WA, Hubbe M. Cranial morphology of early Americans from Lagoa Santa, Brazil: implications for the settlement of the New World. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2005;102(51):18309–18314. doi:10.1073/pnas.0507185102
[3] Neves, WA. et al. Lapa vermelha IV Hominid 1: morphological affinities of the earliest known American. Genet. Mol. Biol. [online]. 1999, vol.22, n.4 pp.461-469. Available from: . ISSN 1415-4757. http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S1415-47571999000400001.
[4] Gaspar Neto, Verlan Valle and Santos, Ricardo Ventura. The colour of the bones: scientific narratives and cultural appropriations of 'Luzia', a prehistoric skull from Brazil. Mana [online]. 2010, vol.5Selected edition [cited 2019-09-04], pp. 0-0 . Available from: . ISSN 0104-9313.
[5] Strauss A, Oliveira RE, Bernardo DV, Salazar-García DC, Talamo S, Jaouen K, et al. (2015) The Oldest Case of Decapitation in the New World (Lapa do Santo, East-Central Brazil), PLoS ONE 10(9): e0137456. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0137456
[6] DNA de fósseis do Brasil desafia teorias de 'descoberta' da América, Evanildo da Silveira De São Paulo para a BBC News Brasil 8 novembro 2018
[7] C. Posth et al., Reconstructing the Deep Population History of Central and South America. Cell 10.1016/j.cell.2018.10.027 (2018)
[8] Goncalves VF, Stenderup J, Rodrigues-Carvalho C, et al. Identification of Polynesian mtDNA haplogroups in remains of Botocudo Amerindians from Brazil, Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2013;110(16):6465–6469. doi:10.1073/pnas.1217905110
[9] Strauss A, Hubbe M, Neves WA, Bernardo DV, and Atuí JV. 2015. The cranial morphology of the Botocudo Indians, Brazil, American Journal of Physical Anthropology 157:202–216.
[10] Beattie O.B., Bryan A.L., (1984). A Fossilized calotte with Prominent Browridges from Lagoa Santa, Brazil. Current Anthropology, vol. 25, no. 3:345-346

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2014 by Austin Whittall © 

More on the Amerindian - Australasian link: Denisovans?

I I have already posted about this The link between Negritos, Papuans and Amerindians!, but the paper by P. Skoglund et al., published online on July 21, 2015 [1], found a close relationship between the genetic makeup of some Amazonian Native Americans and a group of Oceanian or Austalasian people. Namely, the team found "genome-wide data to show that some Amazonian Native Americans descend partly from a Native American founding population that carried ancestry more closely related to indigenous Australians, New Guineans and Andaman Islanders than to any present-day Eurasians or Native Americans. This signature is not present to the same extent, or at all, in present-day Northern and Central Americans or in a ~12,600-year-old Clovis-associated genome, suggesting a more diverse set of founding populations of the Americas than previously accepted.".

Being beind a paywall, since that first posts I have read other online sources who have accessed the paper found some interesting points to share in this post:

Skoglund et al., found that the Amazonian Amerindians like the Suruí, the Xavante and Karitiana share around 1 or 2% of their genes with aboriginal Andamanese, Papuans and Australians. Furthermore, the 12,600 year-old remains from Anzic, Montana, US, don't have any links to these Australasians suggesting that the Anzic child and modern Amazonians have different origins.

Their explanation is the following:

A simple migration from Melanesia north to Bering and then south into America does not seem likely because there are no traces of Australasian genes along the route. It is improbable that they would have covered such a long route without dallying with the locals and spreading their genes.

Instead they suggest that an ancestral population which is now extinct (that is why their genes cannot be found in Asia), lived in eastern Asia and split into two groups, one that moved south into South East Asia, PNG and Australia and another that marched north across eastern Asia and entered America.

They named these mysterious people as "Population Y" (Y from the Tupi word "Ypykuéra", which means "ancestor").

As I am not constrained by the rigidity of orthodox science, I can suggest that there is a Denisovan link involved in this process:

As Austronesians have a very high share of Denisovan genetic input, the hypothetical "Population Y" may well be the group that admixed with Denisovans, and therefore Denisovan genes in America could have this origin.

An alternative explanation however for the lack of "Population Y" traces in Asia could be that the Denisovans lived both in Asia and America, and admixed with the first wave of humans that went into America and also with the first wave through their Asian homeland: the ancestors of the modern Australasians. Later, they became extinct, but their genes lived on. Later still, Asians with a different genetic make up entered America and swept the first people away. Nowadays only 2% of the old genome survives in the Amazonian forests.

Since the very old hg M mtDNA was found in some ancient native remains in America, but is also found in parts of South East Asia, PNG, India and Tibet. Could this be a signal of the first people to reach America from South East Asia?

We have evidence of humans in Southern Asia aroung 120 kya, a very archaic population of humans; and they probably moved into America and mixed with Denisovans there or in Asia. What is the mtDNA of these people? If the hypothetical Out of Africa move took place earlier, then they could be Haplogroup M. We will have to wait for more evidence.

Source

[1] Pontus Skoglund, et al. (2015) Genetic evidence for two founding populations of the Americas, Nature 525, 104–108 (03 September 2015) doi:10.1038/nature14895.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2015 by Austin Whittall © 

More on Amerindians and Austro-Melanesians

Another paper on the peopling of America (Maanasa Raghavan, et al., (2015) Genomic evidence for the Pleistocene and recent population history of Native Americans Science, 23 July 2015 / Page 1 / 10.1126/science.aab3884) proposes that "the ancestors of all present-day Native Americans, including Athabascans and Amerindians, entered the Americas as a single migration wave from Siberia no earlier than 23 thousand years ago (KYA), and after no more than 8,000-year isolation period in Beringia. Following their arrival to the Americas, ancestral Native Americans diversified into two basal genetic branches around 13 KYA, one that is now dispersed across North and South America and the other is restricted to North America."

No early peopling here, no ancient archaic Denisovans or pre-East Asians entering America long ago.

The founding populations were isolated in Beringia and then entered America and that is all there is to it!

But... they do recognize that some Native Americans are close to Austro-Melanesians:

"We found that some American populations, including the Aleutian Islanders, Surui, and Athabascans are closer to Australo-Melanesians compared to other Native Americans, such as North American Ojibwa, Cree and Algonquin, and the South American Purepecha, Arhuaco and Wayuu (fig. S10). The Surui are, in fact, one of closest Native American populations to East Asians and Australo-Melanesians, the latter including Papuans, non-Papuan Melanesians, Solomon Islanders, and South East Asian hunter-gatherers such as Aeta (fig. S10).
We acknowledge that this observation is based on the analysis of a small fraction of the whole genome and SNP chip genotype datasets, especially for the Aleutian Islander data that is heavily masked due to recent admixture with Europeans (28), and that the trends in the data are weak.
Nonetheless, if it proves correct, these results suggest there may be a distant Old World signal related to Australo Melanesians and East Asians in some Native Americans. The widely scattered and differential affinity of Native Americans to the Australo-Melanesians, ranging from a strong signal in the Surui to much weaker signal in northern Amerindians such as Ojibwa, points to this gene flow occurring after the initial peopling by Native American ancestors."

So they recognize the strong links between Austro - Melanesians and Amerindians but suggest it happened after the peopling of America... and that the signal may be due to a limited analysis of the genome (the small sample tested by some statistical fluke gives a high relationship between both populations, but maybe a larger sample of the genome may yield a different outcome).

I find this conclusion rather odd: "The widely scattered and differential affinity of Native Americans to the Australo-Melanesians, ranging from a strong signal in the Surui to much weaker signal in northern Amerindians such as Ojibwa, points to this gene flow occurring after the initial peopling by Native American ancestors".

Odd because it can also be interpreted as follows: South American Natives have a higer signal of Austronesian genes because they are what is left of an ancient migration that was overwhelmed by East Asians in North America.

The tide of Siberian people replaced almost all Austronesian genes in North America and also in South America but those living in relative isolation in the Amazon retained some of the original genes...

Both (theirs and mine) theories explain the gradient (high in S. America - low in N. America) in the Austronesian genetic signal... so which is the best explanation?

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2014 by Austin Whittall ©