Human skeletal remains from Sabana de Bogotá, Colombia: A case of Paleoamerican morphology late survival in South America?

Walter Alves Neves · Mark Hübbe · Gonzalo Correal Urrego

72 citations0/0 files storedAmerican Journal of Physical Anthropology

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Forensic Anthropology and Bioarchaeology Studies Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology Forensic and Genetic Research

Abstract

Human skeletal remains of the first Americans are scarce, especially in North America. In South America the situation is less dramatic. Two important archaeological regions have generated important collections that allow the analysis of the cranial morphological variation of the Early Americans: Lagoa Santa, Brazil, and Sabana de Bogotá, Colombia. Human crania from the former region have been studied by one of us (WAN) and collaborators, showing that the cranial morphology of the first South Americans was very different from that prevailing today in East Asia and among Native Americans. These results have allowed for proposing that the New World may have been colonized by two different biological populations in the final Pleistocene/early Holocene. In this study, 74 human skulls dated between 11.0 and 3.0 kyr, recovered in seven different sites of Sabana de Bogotá, Colombia, were compared with the world cranial variation by different multivariate techniques: Principal Components Analysis, Multidimensional Scaling, and Cluster of Mahalanobis distance matrices. The Colombian skeletal remains were divided in two chronological subgroups: Paleocolombians (11.0-6.0 kyr) and Archaic Colombians (5.0-3.0 kyr). Both quantitative techniques generated convergent results: the Paleocolombians show remarkable similarities with Lagoa Santa and with modern Australo-Melanesians. Archaic Colombians exhibited the same morphological patterns and associations. These findings support our long-held proposition that the early American settlement may have involved two very distinct biological populations coming from Asia. On the other hand, they suggest the possibility of late survivals of the Paleoamerican pattern not restricted to isolated or marginal areas, as previously thought.

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References

1997Bioarchaeology 1996Paleoindian Cave Dwellers in the Amazon: The Peopling of the Americas 2001The settlement of the Americas: a new prehistory 2001Human colonization of the Americas: timing, technology and process 1995Patterns of modern human diversification: Implications for Amerindian origins 2004Detecting genetic drift versus selection in human evolution 2005Cranial morphology of early Americans from Lagoa Santa, Brazil: Implications for the settlement of the New World 1991Morphological affinities of the first Americans: an exploratory analysis based on early South American human remains

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2020Female hunters of the early Americas 2009Developments in Primatology: Progress and Prospects 2012The initial human settlement of Northwest South America during the Pleistocene/Holocene transition: Synthesis and perspectives 2010Paleoamerican morphology in the context of European and East Asian late Pleistocene variation: Implications for human dispersion into the new world 2017Evolutionary population history of early Paleoamerican cranial morphology

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