Variation among early North American Crania

Abstract

The limited morphometric work on early American crania to date has treated them as a single, temporally defined group. This paper addresses the question of whether there is significant variability among ancient American crania. A sample of 11 crania (Spirit Cave, Wizards Beach, Browns Valley, Pelican Rapids, Prospect, Wet Gravel male, Wet Gravel female, Medicine Crow, Turin, Lime Creek, and Swanson Lake) dating from the early to mid Holocene was available. Some have recent accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) dates, while others are dated geologically or archaeologically. All are in excess of 4500 BP, and most are 7000 BP or older. Measurements follow the definitions of Howells [(1973) Cranial variation in man, Cambridge: Harvard University). Some crania are incomplete, but 22 measurements were common to all fossils. Cranial variation was examined by calculating the Mahalanobis distance between each pair of fossils, using a pooled within sample covariance matrix estimated from the data of Howells. The distance relationships among crania suggest the presence of at least three distinct groups: 1) a middle Archaic Plains group (Turin and Medicine Crow), 2) a Paleo/Early Archaic Great Lakes/Plains group (Browns Valley, Pelican Rapids, Lime Creek), and 3) a spatially and temporally heterogeneous group that includes the Great Basin/Pacific Coast (Spirit Cave, Wizards Beach, Prospect) and Nebraska (Wet Gravel specimens and Swanson Lake). These crania were also compared to Howells' worldwide recent sample, which was expanded by including six additional American Indian samples. None of the fossils, except for the Wet Gravel male, shows any particular affinity to recent Native Americans; their greatest similarities are with Europe, Polynesia, or East Asia. Several crania would be atypical in any recent population for which we have data. Browns Valley, Pelican Rapids, and Lime Creek are the most distinctive. They provide evidence for the presence of an early population that bears no similarity to the morphometric pattern of recent American Indians or even to crania of comparable date in other regions of the continent. The heterogeneity among early American crania makes it inadvisable to pool them for purposes of morphometric analysis. Whether this heterogeneity results from different early migrations or one highly differentiated population cannot be established from our data. Our results are inconsistent with hypotheses of an ancestor-descendent relationship between early and late Holocene American populations. They suggest that the pattern of cranial variation is of recent origin, at least in the Plains region.

An alternative view of the peopling of South America: Lagoa Santa in craniometric perspective

“…These results suggest that the Upper Cave 101 might share a genetic stock with the Paleoamericans. Our analyses support that the Paleoamericans in South America and the early North Americans' cranial patterns are different from today's Northeastern Asians Brace et al, 2001;Jantz and Owsley, 2001;Neves et al, , 2007Nelson, 2006;Nelson et al, 2007). However, our results do not support the detection of an 'Australo-Melanesian' pattern of cranial morphology in South and North America (Neves et al, , 2003Neves and Pucciarelli, 1998;Powell and Neves, 1999;González et al, 2003;González-José et al, 2005;Seguchi et al, 2005Seguchi et al, , 2006.…”

“…Brace et al (2001Brace et al ( , 2008 suggest that the Jomon, who might be the direct descendants of the Paleolithic inhabitants of northeast Asia, have an antiquity greater than that of the first inhabitants of the New World. Jantz and Owsley (2001 also state that Paleoamericans resemble recent circum-Pacific populations like the Ainu and Polynesians. Contra to Brace et al (2001), Jantz and Owsley explain this phenomenon a different way.…”

“…The results of these studies are intriguing. The early inhabitants in the Americas have been suggested as resembling population samples ranging from Melanesia and Australia (with a South Asian connection), to Africa and Norway (Verneau, 1903(Verneau, , 1924Rivet, 1908Rivet, , 1957Neves and Pucciarelli, 1991;Lahr, 1995;Neves et al, , 2003Powell and Neves, 1999;Brace et al, 2001Brace et al, , 2008Jantz and Owsley, 2001;González-José et al, 2005;.…”

“…Others argue that the Upper Cave 101 and Liujiang resemble the prehistoric Jomon of Japan and their descendant Ainu and Paleoamericans (Brace et al, 2001;Jantz and Owsley, 2001). Brace et al (2001) demonstrated that these samples show craniometric similarity with the prehisotric Jomon of Japan, the Ainu, and New World populations of modern Native Americans who inhabited the US-Canada border, including the Great Lakes region.…”

Cranial morphology of early Americans from Lagoa Santa, Brazil: Implications for the settlement of the New World

“…The latter is known in the literature as Paleoamerican morphology. However, most studies carried out so far regarding the morphology of the first Americans were based on small cranial samples because human burials older than 8,000 years (8.0 kyr) are rarely found in the Americas, especially in North and Central America (1). In this paper, the morphological affinities of early South Americans are assessed by using the largest sample of early American skulls ever studied.…”