Towards a consensus on modelling the first settlement of the Americas.

GONZÁLEZ JOSÉ, ROLANDO

Belo Horizonte

Simposio; INTERDISCIPLINARY SYMPOSIUM SERIES ON SOUTH AMERICAN (PRE)HISTORY POPULATING THE DIVERSE LANDSCAPES OF SOUTH AMERICA; 2017

Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais

During the last years, a very prolific research on ancient DNA extracted from ancient and modern specimens from the New World and Asian has fueled the debate regarding the timing of the America´s settlement and the affinities among both, extant and extinct populations. The advantages of phylogenetically structured and genome-wide genetic markers extracted from a growing sample of skeletons provide a powerful avenue to decipher affinities and infer past evolutionary processes. However, most interpretations try to expand the genetic evidence to explain patterns of craniofacial variation. In this presentation we argue that, due to the intrinsic complexity of craniofacial phenotypes, direct and simplistic extrapolations of genetic patterns to skeleton data are not always accurate. Recent studies on genome-wide association studies of craniofacial phenotypes, as well as Evo-Devo theoretical and empirical advances, suggest that such complex phenotypes respond to microevolutionary forces in ways that cannot be compared to genomic data on a ?model-free? way. We present some examples of approaches that, in our view, represent a proper and more realistic way to integrate evidence from different markers.