THE SUNDAY TIMES
August 22 1999 UNITED STATES
Aborigines were the first Americans
By Sarah Toyne
THE first people to inhabit America were Australian Aborigines - not American Indians. New archeological findings have uncovered evidence that they crossed
the Pacific Ocean by boat and settled on the continent long before Siberians trekked across the Bering Straits after the Ice Age.
Scientists have reconstructed the skull of a young girl found in Brazil. At 12,000 years old, "Luzia" is the oldest human skeleton yet found on the
American landmass. During the past four years 50 other skulls have been discovered in Brazil and Colombia, all predating the invasion of Mongoloid
peoples from the north about 9,000 years ago.
Luzia's skull was discovered in the early 1970s by a French archeologist in a layer of sediment in Amazonas and was dismissed as insignificant. It was given
away to the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro, where it remained until a few years ago when Walter Neves, professor of biological anthropology at the
University of Sao Paolo, heard about it and realised that it might provide vital clues for solving the mystery of America's anthropological heritage.
The procedure has revealed conclusive evidence of Luzia's ancestry. Neves is still shocked by his findings. "When we started seeing the results, it was
amazing because we realised the statistics were not showing these people to be Mongoloid; they were showing that they were anything except Mongoloid," he
said.
Luzia was reconstructed by Richard Neave, a forensic artist from the University of Manchester, for Ancient Voices, a BBC2 documentary to be shown next week.
Neave's reconstruction backed up Neves's calculations: "That to me is a negroid face. The proportions of the face do not say anything about it being
Mongoloid."
Luzia's facial characteristics are similar to those of the people of the islands of southeast Asia, Australia and Melanesia. "They are similar to
modern-day Aborigines and Africans and show no similarities at all with Mongoloids from east Asia and modern-day Indians," said Neves.
The oldest signs of habitation in north or south America were previously believed to be stone spear points discovered at Clovis, New Mexico, in the
1930s. They were dated at 11,000 years old. Charcoal, a chipped stone stool and scraps of food found recently, however, have been dated at 40,000 years old -
the remains, perhaps, of a campfire lit by ancient seafarers from Asia.
The theory that Aborigines could have travelled by water to the Americas has been given further credence by the discovery of a painting of an ocean- going
vessel in Western Australia, which is 20,000 years old. The 4,000-mile journey between Australia and South America can still be undertaken with relatively
short island hops.
Dennis Stanford, chairman of the anthropology department at the Natural Museum of History in Washington DC, believes the capability of prehistoric peoples
has long been underestimated. "Way back then they weren't really 'cave' people, they were pretty sophisticated, " he said. "I think Neolithic people were doing
a whole lot more than we give them credit for; they were just as smart as you and I, they just did different things."
Further evidence of the fate of the Aboriginal invaders has been provided by computer- imaging technology, used to interpret cave paintings in the Serra da
Capivara in northeastern Brazil. The pictures show pregnant women and hunters chasing giant armadillos, as well as what were initially interpreted by
archeologists as human figures dancing. After more examination, however, the figures are now thought to be warriors spinning through the air with a spear -
illustrating battles between the Aborigines and the invading Mongoloids from the north.
The American Aborigines were almost entirely wiped out by the encroaching Mongoloids, but anthropologists believe that some of their descendants,
interbred with the Mongoloid peoples who preceded today's South American Indians, survived in Tierra del Fuego. Scientists believe that Aboriginal
descendants escaped to this remote island off the southern tip of South America, where they prospered until European settlers migrating to Argentina
at the beginning of the 20th century brought stomach illnesses to the area, which wiped out the majority of the remaining native Fuegans.
Rows of white crosses mark the graves of the Fuegans, who wore sealskins and lit fires everywhere - even in boats - to protect themselves from the harsh
climate. Their skulls have now been analysed to reveal features common to Neves's skulls.
Evidence from Father de Agostini, an Italian ethnographer who filmed the Fuegan way of life in the 1930s, reveal similarities with Aboriginal culture in
Australia. Only a few Fuegans remain alive today, a fading anthropological link with the first native Americans.
http://www.sunday- times.co. uk/
By LARRY ROHTER
IO DE JANEIRO -- A human skull that is prominently displayed
at the National Museum here has been attracting crowds and
controversy in equal measure since it was first unveiled early this month.
After two decades in storage, the fossilized cranium has now been
identified by Brazilian scientists as the oldest human remains ever
recovered in the Western Hemisphere.
The skull is that of a young woman,
nicknamed Luzia, who is believed to
have roamed the savannah of
By LARRY ROHTER
IO DE JANEIRO -- A human skull that is prominently displayed
at the National Museum here has been attracting crowds and
controversy in equal measure since it was first unveiled early this month.
After two decades in storage, the fossilized cranium has now been
identified by Brazilian scientists as the oldest human remains ever
recovered in the Western Hemisphere.
The skull is that of a young woman, nicknamed Luzia, who is believed to have roamed the savannah of south-central Brazil some 11,500 years ago. Even more startling, a reconstruction of her cranium undertaken in Britain this year
indicates that her features appear to be Negroid rather than Mongoloid, suggesting that the Western Hemisphere may have initially been settled not only earlier than thought, but by a people distinct from the ancestors of today's Indian peoples of North and South America.
"We can no longer say that the first colonizers of the Americas came
from the north of Asia, as previous models have proposed," said Dr.
Walter Neves, an anthropologist at the University of São Paulo, who
made the initial discovery along with an Argentine colleague, Héctor
Pucciarelli. "This skeleton is nearly 2,000 years older than any skeleton
ever found in the Americas, and it does not look like those of
Amerindians or North Asians."
If the date is confirmed, the find could transform thinking about the
peopling of the Americas. It may be some time before that work is
completed, but meanwhile, archeologists here and abroad say the find is
potentially very important.
Until Luzia, named as a playful homage to Lucy, the 3.2-million- year-old
human ancestor found in Africa, the oldest known human remains
recovered in the Western Hemisphere were those found in Buhl, Idaho,
and repatriated to the Shoshone Tribe in 1997. Radiocarbon dating tests
have established the age of that skeleton as a bit more than 10,000 years
old.
Luzia's discovery at a location in the state of Minas Gerais called Lapa
Vermelha is consistent, however, with recent findings made at the
celebrated Monte Verde site in southern Chile. There, evidence of human
habitation as early as 12,500 years ago, including stone tools and a
footprint, has been uncovered, though no human remains have yet been
found.
The finds, along with recent discoveries in North America like those of
the so-called Kennewick Man and Spirit Cave Man, are forcing a
reassessment of long-established theories as to the timetable of the
settling of the Americas. Based on such evidence, Dr. Neves suggests
that Luzia belonged to a nomadic people who began arriving in the New
World as early as 15,000 years ago.
Luzia's Negroid features notwithstanding, Dr. Neves is not arguing that
her ancestors came to Brazil from Africa in an early trans-Atlantic
migration. Instead, he believes they originated in Southeast Asia,
"migrating from there in two directions, south to Australia, where today's
aboriginal peoples may be their descendants, and navigating northward
along the coast and across the Bering Straits until they reached the
Americas."
About one-third of Luzia's skeleton has been recovered, enough to
indicate that she appears to have perished in an accident or perhaps even
from an animal attack. She was in her 20's when she died, stood just
under five feet tall, and was part of a group of hunter-gatherers who
appear to have subsisted largely on whatever fruits, nuts and berries they
came across in their meanderings, plus the occasional piece of meat.
"This is intriguing and interesting and I want to know more," Dr. David J.
Meltzer, a professor of anthropology at Southern Methodist University
and an expert on the paleo-Indian populations of North America, said in
a telephone interview from Dallas. "Skeletal material of this age is
extraordinarily rare, both here and in South America, so I am delighted to
know that something of this antiquity is popping up."
The region where Dr. Neves and his associates are working has been the
focus of archeological inquiry since the mid-19th century, when Peter
Wilhelm Lund, a Danish naturalist, first encountered human skeletal
remains there. Many of the specimens he uncovered are now stored at
the University of Copenhagen, but when Dr. Neves went to examine
them, he found that the material had not been catalogued by geological
strata and therefore could not be used for his research.
Luzia herself was originally discovered in 1975 in a rock shelter by a joint
French-Brazilian expedition that was working not far from Belo
Horizonte, Brazil's third-largest city. The skull was buried under more
than 40 feet of mineral deposits and debris, separated from the rest of the
skeleton but otherwise in remarkably good condition.
"This is a site where the soil was high in limestone content, which helped
to preserve these remains for so long," explained Dr. André Prous, a
French archeologist at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, who was
part of the initial team and continues to work in the area. "In other places,
the bones disappear after a short time."
Along with other material from the same expedition, Luzia was then taken
to the national museum here. But she was put away in storage, and it was
not until 1995 that Dr. Neves examined the skull, quickly noticed its
unusual characteristics and invited other scientists, including Dr. Joseph
Powell, an anthropology professor at the University of New Mexico, to
join him in drawing up a profile of Luzia.
Dr. Neves bases his estimate of Luzia's age on the fact that the skull was
found in a geological strata where the age of other organic material has
been established through radiocarbon dating. The same procedure would
ordinarily have been done with Luzia, but the specimen does not have
enough collagen, the protein that gives bone its resiliency, to allow that
standard technique to be used.
"We're sort of stuck," said Dr. Powell, who is also curator of human
osteology at the Maxwell Museum. "We know that she is so old that
most of the organic portion of the bone has leached out. It would have
been great to have the radiocarbon dating, but that is not going to happen
unless techniques improve dramatically, which they may."
With that avenue of verification closed, Dr. Neves is making other efforts
to determine the racial and other characteristics of Luzia. Early this year,
a computerized image of Luzia's skull was sent to Richard Neave, a
forensic specialist on the faculty of medicine at the University of
Manchester in England, with a request that he reconstruct her face.
"It was in much better shape than many other forensic subjects we have
had to do," Mr. Neave said in a telephone interview. What he ended up
with when he finished was a face "with the features one associates with
Negroid skulls, particularly the nose" and jaw.
"When you do this sort of work, it is very important to have no
preconceived ideas," Mr. Neave said. "I personally would stick my neck
out and say it is conclusive support for his findings and demonstrates
without any doubt at all" that Luzia is of non-Mongoloid origins.
When her remains were discovered, Luzia was alone. But more than 40
other skeletons that appear to be from the same general period have
been found in a nearby area called Lagoa Santa, and scientists in Brazil
hope to be able to test Dr. Neves's theory by doing radiocarbon dating
on at least some of them.
"There are a large number of skeletons at this site, some of them in better
condition than that of Luzia," Dr. Prous said. "There is a great density of
skeletons there, buried in an organized fashion, and so we conclude this
was a cemetery for them, perhaps the oldest in the Americas."
Initial indications are that these skeletons indeed have many of the same
facial features and other characteristics that first made Luzia stand out.
"We see this pattern with other skeletons of the same age" from the
Lagoa Santa site, Dr. Powell said. "We have seen 37 of them now, and
they all have this sort of unusual appearance."
In an effort to test the theory that Luzia belonged to a people ethnically
distinct from the ancestors of modern North and South American
Indians, scientists have also begun DNA sequencing in the Lagoa Santa
skeletons. Dr. Sérgio Pena, a geneticist at the Federal University of
Minas Gerais, is conducting one set of tests while other samples have
been sent to the Max Planck Anthropological Institute in Germany,
where the DNA of Neanderthal Man was isolated in 1997, for
examination.
"We know that today's Amerindians have four main groups," said Dr.
Pena, who found a genetic marker common to 17 different widely
dispersed Indian groups across the Americans in the course of an earlier
project. "What would constitute molecular proof of Walter's hypothesis is
to find DNA sequences completely different from those four groups."
Dr. Meltzer said: "This is clearly the way to resolve the issue. The skull is
intriguing morphological evidence, but in order to really nail down this
issue of affinity, you need evidence, and DNA is the way to go."
south-central Brazil some 11,500
years ago. Even more startling, a
reconstruction of her cranium
undertaken in Britain this year
indicates that her features appear to be
Negroid rather than Mongoloid,
suggesting that the Western
Hemisphere may have initially been
settled not only earlier than thought,
but by a people distinct from the
ancestors of today's Indian peoples of North and South America.
"We can no longer say that the first colonizers of the Americas came
from the north of Asia, as previous models have proposed," said Dr.
Walter Neves, an anthropologist at the University of São Paulo, who
made the initial discovery along with an Argentine colleague, Héctor
Pucciarelli. "This skeleton is nearly 2,000 years older than any skeleton
ever found in the Americas, and it does not look like those of
Amerindians or North Asians."
If the date is confirmed, the find could transform thinking about the
peopling of the Americas. It may be some time before that work is
completed, but meanwhile, archeologists here and abroad say the find is
potentially very important.
Until Luzia, named as a playful homage to Lucy, the 3.2-million- year-old
human ancestor found in Africa, the oldest known human remains
recovered in the Western Hemisphere were those found in Buhl, Idaho,
and repatriated to the Shoshone Tribe in 1997. Radiocarbon dating tests
have established the age of that skeleton as a bit more than 10,000 years
old.
Luzia's discovery at a location in the state of Minas Gerais called Lapa
Vermelha is consistent, however, with recent findings made at the
celebrated Monte Verde site in southern Chile. There, evidence of human
habitation as early as 12,500 years ago, including stone tools and a
footprint, has been uncovered, though no human remains have yet been
found.
The finds, along with recent discoveries in North America like those of
the so-called Kennewick Man and Spirit Cave Man, are forcing a
reassessment of long-established theories as to the timetable of the
settling of the Americas. Based on such evidence, Dr. Neves suggests
that Luzia belonged to a nomadic people who began arriving in the New
World as early as 15,000 years ago.
Luzia's Negroid features notwithstanding, Dr. Neves is not arguing that
her ancestors came to Brazil from Africa in an early trans-Atlantic
migration. Instead, he believes they originated in Southeast Asia,
"migrating from there in two directions, south to Australia, where today's
aboriginal peoples may be their descendants, and navigating northward
along the coast and across the Bering Straits until they reached the
Americas."
About one-third of Luzia's skeleton has been recovered, enough to
indicate that she appears to have perished in an accident or perhaps even
from an animal attack. She was in her 20's when she died, stood just
under five feet tall, and was part of a group of hunter-gatherers who
appear to have subsisted largely on whatever fruits, nuts and berries they
came across in their meanderings, plus the occasional piece of meat.
"This is intriguing and interesting and I want to know more," Dr. David J.
Meltzer, a professor of anthropology at Southern Methodist University
and an expert on the paleo-Indian populations of North America, said in
a telephone interview from Dallas. "Skeletal material of this age is
extraordinarily rare, both here and in South America, so I am delighted to
know that something of this antiquity is popping up."
The region where Dr. Neves and his associates are working has been the
focus of archeological inquiry since the mid-19th century, when Peter
Wilhelm Lund, a Danish naturalist, first encountered human skeletal
remains there. Many of the specimens he uncovered are now stored at
the University of Copenhagen, but when Dr. Neves went to examine
them, he found that the material had not been catalogued by geological
strata and therefore could not be used for his research.
Luzia herself was originally discovered in 1975 in a rock shelter by a joint
French-Brazilian expedition that was working not far from Belo
Horizonte, Brazil's third-largest city. The skull was buried under more
than 40 feet of mineral deposits and debris, separated from the rest of the
skeleton but otherwise in remarkably good condition.
"This is a site where the soil was high in limestone content, which helped
to preserve these remains for so long," explained Dr. André Prous, a
French archeologist at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, who was
part of the initial team and continues to work in the area. "In other places,
the bones disappear after a short time."
Along with other material from the same expedition, Luzia was then taken
to the national museum here. But she was put away in storage, and it was
not until 1995 that Dr. Neves examined the skull, quickly noticed its
unusual characteristics and invited other scientists, including Dr. Joseph
Powell, an anthropology professor at the University of New Mexico, to
join him in drawing up a profile of Luzia.
Dr. Neves bases his estimate of Luzia's age on the fact that the skull was
found in a geological strata where the age of other organic material has
been established through radiocarbon dating. The same procedure would
ordinarily have been done with Luzia, but the specimen does not have
enough collagen, the protein that gives bone its resiliency, to allow that
standard technique to be used.
"We're sort of stuck," said Dr. Powell, who is also curator of human
osteology at the Maxwell Museum. "We know that she is so old that
most of the organic portion of the bone has leached out. It would have
been great to have the radiocarbon dating, but that is not going to happen
unless techniques improve dramatically, which they may."
With that avenue of verification closed, Dr. Neves is making other efforts
to determine the racial and other characteristics of Luzia. Early this year,
a computerized image of Luzia's skull was sent to Richard Neave, a
forensic specialist on the faculty of medicine at the University of
Manchester in England, with a request that he reconstruct her face.
"It was in much better shape than many other forensic subjects we have
had to do," Mr. Neave said in a telephone interview. What he ended up
with when he finished was a face "with the features one associates with
Negroid skulls, particularly the nose" and jaw.
"When you do this sort of work, it is very important to have no
preconceived ideas," Mr. Neave said. "I personally would stick my neck
out and say it is conclusive support for his findings and demonstrates
without any doubt at all" that Luzia is of non-Mongoloid origins.
When her remains were discovered, Luzia was alone. But more than 40
other skeletons that appear to be from the same general period have
been found in a nearby area called Lagoa Santa, and scientists in Brazil
hope to be able to test Dr. Neves's theory by doing radiocarbon dating
on at least some of them.
"There are a large number of skeletons at this site, some of them in better
condition than that of Luzia," Dr. Prous said. "There is a great density of
skeletons there, buried in an organized fashion, and so we conclude this
was a cemetery for them, perhaps the oldest in the Americas."
Initial indications are that these skeletons indeed have many of the same
facial features and other characteristics that first made Luzia stand out.
"We see this pattern with other skeletons of the same age" from the
Lagoa Santa site, Dr. Powell said. "We have seen 37 of them now, and
they all have this sort of unusual appearance."
In an effort to test the theory that Luzia belonged to a people ethnically
distinct from the ancestors of modern North and South American
Indians, scientists have also begun DNA sequencing in the Lagoa Santa
skeletons. Dr. Sérgio Pena, a geneticist at the Federal University of
Minas Gerais, is conducting one set of tests while other samples have
been sent to the Max Planck Anthropological Institute in Germany,
where the DNA of Neanderthal Man was isolated in 1997, for
examination.
"We know that today's Amerindians have four main groups," said Dr.
Pena, who found a genetic marker common to 17 different widely
dispersed Indian groups across the Americans in the course of an earlier
project. "What would constitute molecular proof of Walter's hypothesis is
to find DNA sequences completely different from those four groups."
Dr. Meltzer said: "This is clearly the way to resolve the issue. The skull is
intriguing morphological evidence, but in order to really nail down this
issue of affinity, you need evidence, and DNA is the way to go."
Author
