David Reich's take on the Y population and Australasians

The mysterious and ancient ghost population known as "Y" Population mentioned in yesterday's post (and in several other posts over the past years) was explored in depth by Harvard geneticist, David Reich in his 2018 book Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past 🔓.

In Chapter 7 (starts on p. 155), dedicated to the original ancestors of the Native Americans, Reich explains the theories and timing of the peopling of America based on current archaeological and genetic data.

Reich tells how the one wave peopled South America mutated over the years, and now we believe that at least four separate migrations led to the current makeup of Native Americans. Of relevance is the section starting on p. 176 that looks into the Y population.

The basics are the following: Walter Neves was the first to propose (see post) base on skull morphology, that ancient Brazilian paleoindians, like those found in Lagoa Santa were very similar to those of Australian aboriginals and Melanesians from Papua New Guinea.

Fig 21 in Reich's book, original caption reads: Despite extraordinary geographic distance, populations in the Amazon share ancestry with Australians, New Guineans, and Andamanese to a greater extent than with other Eurasians. This may reflect an early movement of humans into the Americas from a source population that is no longer substantially represented in northeast Asia.

This was very controversial, and opposed by the mainstream anthropologists. However, Pontus Skoglund investigated this possibility and after looking into the genetics of different native people, "found two Native American populations, both from the Amazon region of Brazil, that are more closely related to Australasians than to other world populations... Skoglund found weaker signals of genetic affinity to Australasians, but still probably real, in other Native American populations ringing the Amazon basin. He estimated that the proportion of ancient ancestry in these populations was small—1 to 6 percent—with the rest being consistent with First American ancestry."

This pattern appeared not only in Skoglund's data (by the way, Skoglund was working with Reich as a postdoctoral student), but in other data sets collected by other scientists. Furthermore, they also showed that it wasn't a recent admixture with people from Australia or Papua New Guinea, nor the result of Polynesians carrying these alleles across the Pacific to America.

The remarkable findings are that:

• Similar yet not closely related: "while Amazonians had their strongest affinity to indigenous people from Australia, New Guinea, and the Andaman Islands (compared to East Asians as a baseline), they were not particularly close to any of them"
• It was highest among the Suruí, Karitiana, and Xavante groups, and almost absent elsewhere: "We found little or no Population Y ancestry in Mesoamerica or in South Americans to the west of the high Andes. We also did not detect Population Y ancestry in the almost thirteen-thousand-year old genome of the Clovis culture infant from the northern United States, or in present-day Algonquin speakers from Canada. The Population Y geographic distribution is largely limited to Amazonia, providing yet more evidence for an ancient origin" Reich attributes this limited distribution to an "original pioneering population that was once more broadly distributed and was then marginalized by the expansion of other groups."
• Two groups of Native Americans with skulls similar to those of Neves' Paleoindians were tested by other researchers, they were Pericués of Baja California, and Fuegians in Argentina, however, neither group carried the signal of Population Y alleles.

This evidence suggests different population possibilities to Reich: (1) Population Y reached America first, spread across the continent and later, when the "First Americans" (actually, the current ones, but not first, they were second) arrived they displaced and replaced the Population Y people "either completely or only partially, as in Amazonia. Population Y ancestry may have survived better in Amazonia than it did elsewhere because of the relative impenetrability of the Amazonian environment." So, in the Amazons the original Population Y was not razed, but admixed gradually with the newcomers.

The current levels of Population Y ancestry in the Amazonians may be small (~2%), Reich states that the impact of the ghost populations should not be dismissed. Reich proposes a second theory (2) in which he supposes that the Population Y people as they walked across Asia and Siberia into "northern North America where the ancestors of First Americans were also living. It is likely that Population Y was already mixed with large amounts of First American–related ancestry when it started expanding into South America. If so, then the ancestry derived from a lineage related to southern Asians is only a kind of “tracer dye” for Population Y ancestry—like the heavy metals injected into patients’ veins in hospitals to track the paths of their blood vessels in a CT scan. Our estimate of around 2 percent Population Y ancestry in the Suruí is based on the assumption that Population Y traversed the entirety of Northeast Asia and America without mixing with other people it encountered. If we allow for the likelihood that there was mixture with populations related to First Americans on the way, the proportion of Population Y in the Suruí could be as high as 85 percent and still produce the observed statistical evidence of relatedness to Australasians. If the true proportion is even a fraction of this, then the story of First Americans expanding into virgin territory is profoundly misleading. Instead, we need to think in terms of an expansion of a highly substructured founding population of the Americas. The history and timing of the arrival of Population Y in the Americas is likely to be resolved only with recovery of ancient DNA from skeletons with Population Y ancestry."

So, in this second scenario, the Y Population isn't the original one, instead it was part of the First People reaching America, in a very highly structured population which somehow (Reich does not explain the mechanism though!) had already admixed with other Native groups, yet did not leave any signal in North America or Central America, or anwyhere other than the Amazon region.

I agree that further studies are needed, and finding Population Y remains will be of capital intererst, but also, we need a theory proposing a clear mechanism, other than Bottlenecks and genetic drift, to explain how the Population Y signal was erased, and is absent among present day Amerindians all across America —except for these three Amazonian groups.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall © 

April 2026 study on the diversity of Amerindian genes & Austronesian admixing

Several studies have reported an Austronesian component in Native Americans, and I have mentioned this in various posts. A recent paper published on April 22, 2026 in Nature (Castro e Silva, M.A., Nunes, K., Ribeiro, M.R. et al. The evolutionary history and unique genetic diversity of Indigenous Americans. Nature 653, 134–145 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10406-w) explores these matters as well as the diversity, ages, distribution, and population waves ov the people that peopled America.

In the abstract, the authors point out that Native Americans "harbour extensive and previously uncharacterized genetic diversity" and attribute it to "at least three dispersals into South America". They also suggest that natural selection has acted on Neanderthal, Denisovan, and ancient Australasian alleles because they conferred adaptative advantages.

An imporant finding is the Australasian signal: "Notably, several genomic regions exhibit a remarkable allele sharing with Australasian populations, probably originating from an ancient admixture event and partly maintained by selection for more than 10,000 years."

Diversity

The paper says that scholars in general believe that America is "less genetically diverse than other continental human groups" (due to the Beringian bottleneck, founding effects and the European and African slave trade admixtures, however in this study they found new single-nucleotide variants (SNVs), roughly 11,000 new variants per individual, which, although lower than the African level of 27.800 per person is very similar to that of the Oceanians.

The paper states that "despite lower overall diversity, Indigenous Americans carry many previously unreported variants. This reflects both substantial genetic variation and long-standing underrepresentation in genomic resources." One measure of lack of diversity caused by isolation and small founder populations which lead to inbreeding. This is seen in the genome by a higher number of runs of homozygosity (ROHs). However, the expected higher ROH due to "serial bottlenecks following entry into the Americas" was not observed, because ROH does not show any "significant correlation with geographic distance from Alaska, longitude or latitude." Instead there were hotspots with high ROH in specific regions of the Americas, such as areas around the Amazonia in Brazil, Bolivia, and Peru.

Ancient Splits

The split from other Old World people is ancient, definitively pre-Clovis, and in my opinion, the older boundary is really ancient, suggesting an early peopling of America: "Cross-coalescence rate estimates (Methods) show that Indigenous American populations, grouped by genetic cluster, diverged from other continental groups between about 70,000 and 15,000 years ago." I mean the 70 ky limit. Very old indeed!

A Replacement 9,000 years ago

The paper mentions that some 9 kya a new genetic lineage sperad across Central America and the Caribbean, reaching South America and affected groups that still exist, like the Quechua of the Peruvian and Bolivian highlands, and the Tehuelche of Pataonia. These people partially replaced ancient lineages older than 9 kya. Then came a third wave around 1,300 years ago.

North American natives are very different "Indigenous North American populations are the most genetically distinct from South American groups."

Mapuches and the Amazon

Interestingly the paper finds that although the Tehuelche people of Patagonia have managed to retain their original genomic makeup, they "derive most ancestry from a Chaco sister branch (third dispersal)", and a similar effect is noticed among the Quechua. I have posted about a possible Southern Amazonian or Chacoan origin for the Mapuche people (see here and here), who live between Quechua and Tehuelches, and who have admixed with modern Tehuelches. The recent arrival of a Guarani component into the Mapuche could account for their similar myths and legendary beasts. This paper with its 3rd-wave seems to support this notion.

Affinity with Australasians

The similarity between genes of some Native Americans and contemporary Australasians has been explained as follows: the ancestors of Amerindians admixed in the distant past with some ancient archaic Asian people, known as Ypykuéra (a Tupi word meaning "Ancestors") or "Y" population, which is "partially related to a sister clade of present-day Australasians." (see my post and this one too).

The study found that the highest affinity with Australasians was centered in the Chaco Region, eastern and western South American as well as the Southwestern Amazon region (Paraguay, Bolivia, Northern Argentina, and South-southeastern Brazil. It is found among the Giarani, Surui, Awaj&uactue;, Ayoreo, Karitiana, Sirionó amd Tsimané people. It dates back to an ancient sample found in Sumidouro, Brazil, 10,400 years old. It increased from there on, "especially in the Andes, Pacific Coast and western South America." But the Pacific area, despite suggesting a transoceanic contact is disregarded by the authors, who instead prefer to support the idea that "this ancestry was present during the initial peopling of America and that it may have contributed more strongly to Late Holocene and present-day genetic diversity".

They tested if the Australasian link was due to introgression of archaics, like Neanderthals and Denisovans. This makes sense, Oceanian people have a high contribution of Denisovan ancestry. But, "No correlation was detected between Australasian and Neanderthal or Denisovan affinity. By contrast, Neanderthal and Denisovan affinities were strongly correlated, consistent with homogeneous archaic ancestry in the founding populations" In other words, the Neanderthal and Denisovan component of Amerindians is not linked to Australasians. So my suggestions in this post and this one, are not valid.

They also rejected the idea that the similarity with Australasians is due to isolation, where different groups retained the "Y" component. Isolation, marked by higher ROHs is not linked to Australasian affinity or inbreeding. Furthermore, those natives with higher ROH, and higher inbreeding have low Australasian affinity.

They also tested the link between the ancient Southeast Asian people, the Hòabìnhian people, and compared them with two samples of this population, La368 and La364. They found "significant correlations for La368 and La364. These results support a shared ancestry component between Indigenous Americans and Australasians that extends deep into the past." A short, laconic, explains-nothing phrase. How does the signal reach America? See my post on the H&oagrave;abìnhian and Austronesians here.

Finally the low prevalence 1-3% of Y genes in Amerindians suggests that at least some of these alleles were positively selected for and maintained over the past 10,000 years: "these findings indicate that several genomic regions sharing alleles with present-day Australasians were probably targets of positive selection. The candidate genes in these loci participate in critical biological processes that may have shaped the health and adaptive history of Indigenous American populations. However, positive selection seems to have acted on only a subset of Ypykuéra ancestry loci, whereas the remaining regions show no evidence of selection and are probably shaped by neutral evolutionary processes."

Conclusion

There is an Austronesian imprint in Amerindians, but we don't know why. The Native American people are diverse, and ROHs are not a sign of lack of diversity due to bottlenecks. Mapuche people have a recent 1,300 year-old ancestry from Guarani people. Deeper research and more samples will show a clearer picture.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall © 

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

Austronesians and America: the Transpacific Route

A few days ago, I posted about the possibility that an ancient wave of people from what is now known as Melanesia (including Australia), reached America long before the Polynesian contact that has been suggested took place around AD 1200-1400. Today we will look into this scenario.

Polynesians are said to have originated in an "Out of Taiwan" migration that swept in a wide arch south, across the islands of Indonesia, and then across New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, Bougainville, and the Solomon Islands. There they originated the Lapita Culture and established the Polynesian languages around 3,500 years ago. They then moved to the Islands southeast of the Solomons such as Vanuatu and Fiji (3,000 years ago). They stood still there for a long time before spreading into distant Polynesia around 800 AD, and Micronesia around AD 1250 their expansion ended in New Zealand.

The discovery and peopling of Eastern Polynesia required advanced sailing skills. An interesting paper delves in depth with this matter, and states that: "The immense seascape of East Polynesia and increasing contrary winds required advances in navigation and technology. The settlement of East Polynesia involved a package of technological innovations." The inner islands around New Guinea and Melanesia were easy to navigate with wind blowing in two directions, but crossing the ocean towards distant Polynesia meant sailing against the wind.

The invention of the sprit sail, more efficient V-shaped hulls (vs. U-shaped ones), and larger planked double-hulled canoes that could carry more cargo and people, all favored the exansion across Polynesia.

Peopling of Polynesia. Source. See original image

An Earlier Date for Arrivals of Human Beings the Southwestern Pacific

A study published in 2011 reports an "older" age for the first humans in the region:l

"Our results show that the maternal ancestors of most Remote Pacific islanders split from Asian mainland lineages ∼10–20 ka, rather than ∼5.5 ka, as would be the case if they were to be explained by the “out of Taiwan” model. They had established themselves in the Bismarck Archipelago by at least ∼6 ka, rather than arriving there ∼3.5 ka with the advent of Lapita pottery, as the model predicts."

This earlier date is interesting. Did these people have the seafaring abilities of the later ancestral Polynesians? Could their boats cross long ocean distances? It is doubtfull. The Aboriginal population of Australia who has lived on the Island-Continent for +60,000 years, possessed limited seafaring abilities.

See this interesting webpage with images drawn by Europeans during the discovery period (late 1700s) of the watercraft used by Aboriginal people. They used rafts, simple dugout, or bark canoes, tied-reeds, and similar rudimentary vessels, like the one picture below.

They resemble the canoes used by the Fuegian Yamaná and Alakaluf, and the Chono people of southwestern Patagonia. The reed canoes are similar to those used by the Uros of Lake Titicaca in Bolivia. This shows that the ancestral skills of making simple watercraft were shared by all ancient human beings.

They couldn't have crossed the Pacific Ocean in one of these canoes.

The "Kelp Highway"

Another route using calm coastal waters was proposed by Jon Erlandson et al in a 2007 paper (The Kelp Highway Hypothesis: Marine Ecology, the Coastal Migration Theory, and the Peopling of the Americas). In it, they put forward the theory that the kelp seaweed forests along the North Pacific coasts of Asia and North America would have allowed people to find food, on their journey from Australia to Japan, Siberia, Alaska, California. South of this point, mangroves and coral reefs replace the kelp, but, serve the same purpose, guiding the migrants into South America. This kelp highway avoids the risky transpacific oceanic route.

Interestingly, the fuegian people thrived in an area with kelp-rich waters. Kelp algae form underwater forests, which support rich marine life such as fish, sea urchins, crabs, and sea otters. In the North Pacific they were the home of the herbivore Steller's Sea Cow, extinct since the 1700s.

Kelp and seals in the Beagle Channel, Tierra del Fuego. Source

Kelp Forests around the globe. Source

An interesting theory!

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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 © 

Similar myths between Patagonians and Australians

Some Patagonian Natives' myths that are very similar to those found in Australia, among the Aboriginal people.

As I mention further down, the human mind whether modern or archaic, Aboriginal, Chinese or Patagonian has a rather limited set of emotions or feelings to deal with. So fear is usually elicited by means of monsters, man-eating ogres, creatures from the dark, living-dead and son on. It should not surprise us to find giants, dwarves,trolls, lake creatures and all kinds of monsters that have their equivalent in different parts of the world. They were all "invented" by the "limited" human mind.

Having said this, people with a common origin share traditions, which in the very distant past were the glue that kept clans or tribe together. They were passed on from father to son, mother do daughter over countless generations and have survived until this day. A clear example is Little Red Riding Hood, which struck fear into us when we were children: a man-eating (or better said, a "granny-eating") wolf in a forest! How many of us have seen a real live wolf? Very few. Maybe on a documentary on Alaska or Canada, but never in the wild.

But the story is based on real facts: forests are dangerous, wolves exist and careless children may fall prey to them (or other strangers) or worse, also cause trouble to their kin.

So below are some of these shared myths:

Tehuelche native myths from Patagonia

I copy pasted from my book, I have added some comments to give context, in brackets "[]":

"Yiakelon she- ­ghosts. These ghost­ women dwelled among the cracks of the cliffs and escarpments and bear an amazing similarity to the Australian Aboriginal belief in ‘Mimi’, who were tall slim mischievous beings that also lived among the rocky crags. The Aboriginals believed that before their arrival to Australia, Mimi had human shape and taught men how to hunt, cook, talk, sing and also, to paint the rocks (note the extraordinary similarity with Elal). Once again we have a myth relating both cultures, Australian and Patagonian; if it is a coincidence, it is striking...

"...The creature described by Falkner [comment: among the Guarani natives in Paraguay] is surprisingly similar to the Iemisch [among the Tehuelche of Patagonia]; no wonder Musters quickly identified the Patagonian water tiger with it. A Guaraní legend about Guarán,the native warrior who slayed Yaguarú, provides some interesting details about the beast, not only did it live in a cave by the river bank but it also had a strong tail and a taste for women’s flesh, it was also foul smelling just like Ayayema, Kawtcho, Mapinguari and the dwarfish Chupacabras. [several Amerindian monsters]
A Pan-Gondwanan beast? A similar mythical creature, an amalgam of giant otter and feline, is said to live in New Zealand, the ‘Waitoreke’ —Maori for “water animal with spurs”. The Australian Aboriginals also had their equivalent water monster, the foul smelling ‘Bunyip’. This may reveal once again possible ancient cultural ties between Australoids and southern South American natives, or maybe the repetition of similar themes across dissimilar and totally unrelated human cultures; perhaps we humans have a limited repertoire of fears and they tend to crop up again and again in our myths. It may also indicate that the former super continent of Gondwana was home to a strange water creature...

Selk'nam myths from Tierra del Fuego

"... at the dawn of time, during the mythical era of the ‘Hoowin’, the legendary ancestors of the Selk’nam [lived]. Once again, this bears a striking similarity with the Australian Aboriginals’ belief that all things began with the Dreamtime; a sacred era out of time in which ancestral Totemic Spirit Beings formed the creation."

The Hoowin was a time that preceded us, the world was peopled by the Sun, Moon, stars, snow, wind, sea, all of them very powerful witches. Then the modern world formed, many of these creatures turned into animals, mountains, lakes and the sea... humans were created out of this mysterious ancestral Hoowin world.

Hoowin is very similar to the Dreamtime, an "everywhen", a "time out of time" which was peopled by the ancestors of Australian Aboriginals, who had supernatural abilities and lived in this Dream Time that preceded creation...

"Fascinatingly, the Australian Aboriginal people also have legends about wild hairy pigmies that they called Gubba; these are very similar to the Fuegian Yosi in appearance and size, being barely one meter tall (3 ft 4 in).
...The Aboriginals, besides ‘Gubba’ that was akin to the Fuegian Yosi, also recognized another large wild hominid, the ‘Yowie’ or “great hairy man” that killed and ate people. Some Australian researchers such as Gilroy, Cropper and Healy believe that Yowie is a Homo erectus, a human ancestor which became extinct worldwide when modern man, Homo sapiens, moved out of Africa. According to them, it somehow managed to survive in Australia long enough to coexist with men.In the Australian case, it is reasonable to assume H. erectus habitation prior to modern humans, because its remains ve been found close by, in neighboring Indonesia. This could imply that the Patagonians’ ancestors, the Australoids, could have encountered H. erectus in Austronesia and brought it with them as their ‘hairy men’ myths when migrating to America..."

I also explained the Austronesian hypothesis as follows:

"The Austronesian hypothesis
All these Patagonians, were quite different from the rest of South American natives; this has been revealed by a study of their mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). This type of DNA is maternally inherited and allows researchers to trace the maternal lineage back in time and to establish connections between groups of people based on differences in their mtDNA. mtDNA taken from skeletons of the now extinct Yagan, Selk’nam and Alakaluf populations as well as Aonikenk Tehuelche show that they, from a genetic viewpoint, were different from all other American natives (including the Mapuche in northern Patagonia). It is noteworthy that the skeletal remains of Fuegians, the Patagonian natives and their Paleo­Indian ancestors also depart from the typical Mongoloid pattern found in other American Indian (Amerindian) groups such as the Mapuche. Both lines of evidence suggest that there may have been more than one migratory wave of Asian people ancestral to the American natives. It may also be possible that the ancestors of all the Patagonian PaleoIndians came in an independent migration long before the arrival of the ‘Clovis people’. The Clovis had entered the continent through Bering Strait via Alaska about 13,500 years BP. They are considered as the Americas’ first inhabitants (hence the ‘Clovis­ first’ model) yet, southern South America, which according to the Clovis first model should be the last part of the continent to be occupied by humans, seems to have sites as old as or even older than the Clovis sites found in North America. Human remains discovered in Brazil show a very strong resemblance to modern South Pacific people, suggesting that America was first colonized by the generalized human (Homo sapiens) population that inhabited East Asia in the Late Pleistocene. These people arrived in America in very ancient times long before the Mongolid morphology of the forbearers of the Clovis had evolved.
They may also be the ancestors of the southern Patagonian Paleo Indians, and their different racial origin and cultural background may have a bearing on the myths and legends of their Tehuelche and Fuegian descendants. It is extremely likely that these first Americans brought with them their own set of ancient tales about strange beings, and gradually adapted them to their new home. There are, as we will see, surprising coincidences between Patagonian and Austronesian myths. It was these original people who forged legends that even today pervade throughout Patagonia."

Quotes from A. Whittall, Monsters of Patagonia, Zagier & Urruty.

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

On Austronesians and Amerindians

It is not often that one has the chance to quote onseself, but in view of my previous post, I will quote my book regarding the early peopling of America by Austronesians, a theory put forth by Rivet quite some time ago:

The Austronesian hypothesis

So, allow me to immodestly quote from my book Monsters of Patagonia:

These ‘Australoids’ were indeed part of the first wave of modern humans (Homo sapiens) to leave Africa about 100,000 years ago. They used watercraft to navigate coastal waters and could have easily sailed along the shores of Asia, across Bering Strait into America long before the appearance of the Mongoloid type in Siberia 20,000 years ago. When the Mongoloid Asians later moved across Beringia into America, they advanced on those original Americans replacing them. A few remnants of the first wave survived extermination by the newcomers isolated in the remote Patagonian hinterland. This theory that we have outlined above was first proposed by French ethnologist Paul Rivet (1876-1958), but its validity rests on the disputed navigation skills of the Australoids. To overcome this, Portuguese anthropologist Mendes Correia (1888-1960) proposed a migration route via Tasmania, the Antarctic and Drake Passage, instead of trans-Pacific route, entering South America at Tierra del Fuego some 8,000 years BP, before the Antarctic ice cap formed. But this is conception is highly disputed and lacks archaeological proof.

While researching for my book, I came across many similarities between the myths of Patagonian natives and those of the Australian Aboriginals, they are remarkably similar in many strange ways. It gives support to the notion of a common origin for both groups.

Now some questions to be answered... what about the Denisovan admixture? People in Melanesia have the highest admixture of Denisovan genes. What about Amerindians? Did admixture take place before Amerindians and Austronesians split? or after? There is a lot to learn!

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

The link between Negritos, Papuans and Amerindians!

At last a paper that sheds some light on the origin of Native Americans. I was pleasantly surprised to see a paper today that postulates that America had two distinct founding populations and that the older one, found in South America, is linked to Negrito people of the Andamans, Papuans, New Guineans and Australian Aboriginals.

This is the paper: Pontus Skoglund, Swapan Mallick, Maria Cátira Bortolini, Niru Chennagiri, Tábita Hünemeier, Maria Luiza Petzl-Erler, Francisco Mauro Salzano,Nick Patterson,David Reich. Nature (2015) Genetic evidence for two founding populations of the Americas doi:10.1038/nature14895 Received 05 February 2015 Accepted 14 July 2015 Published online 21 July 2015,

The paper is here LINK; the following image is the map that portrays that similarity between those groups:

Just in case you are expecting a post-discovery of American admixture of Asian genes with Amerindian ones... the paper on page 3 shows that they are closer to South East Asians Onge than to Polynesians. The closing paragraphs hint at a very ancient origin for these Amerindian ancestors and this is because though they are similar to the Andaman Negrito-Papuan group they "are not particularly closely related to any of them" and the original population that later led to these Amerindian ancestors became extinct in Asia. By the way, the Andaman natives and the Negrito people are believed to be among the oldest humans out of Africa.

Allow me to throw a wild idea: how can we be sure the flow was from South east Asia to America and not the other way round? an Out of America move from a basal archaic population that lived in the Americas?

And I recall my post on Y chromosome Haplogroup C, which is present in America at low frequencies and... also found in SE Asia.

It is indeed an interesting discovery and is I believe related to the recent paper on the Botocudos, which I wrote about a few weeks ago: "Put together we could conjecture that the old human lineage that peopled Asia reached the New World long before later East Asian or Siberian waves got there. That they are found in some secluded parts of America. They are old, and linked to Melanesia, Australia (whose inhabitants recently moved across the Pacific peopling Polynesia)."

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