INVESTIGADORES
DE AZEVEDO Soledad
artículos
Título:
Brief Communication: Ancient Remains and the First Peopling of the Americas: Reassessing the Hoyo Negro Skull
Autor/es:
SOLEDAD DE AZEVEDO; MARIA CÁTIRA BORTOLINI; SANDRO L. BONATTO; TÁBITA HÜNEMEIER; FABRÍCIO SANTOS ; GONZÁLEZ-JOSÉ, ROLANDO
Revista:
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Editorial:
WILEY-LISS, DIV JOHN WILEY & SONS INC
Referencias:
Lugar: New York; Año: 2015 vol. 158 p. 514 - 521
ISSN:
0002-9483
Resumen:
ABSTRACT OBJECTIVE: A noticeably well-preserved _12.500 years-old skeleton from the Hoyo Negro cave, Yucat_an, M_exico, was recently reported, along with its archaeological, genetic and skeletal characteristics. Based exclusively on an anatomical description of the skull (HN5/ 48), Chatters and colleagues stated that this specimen can be assigned to a set of ancient remains that differ from modern Native Americans, the so called ?Paleoamericans?. Here, we aim to further explore the morphological affinities of this specimen with a set of comparative cranial samples covering ancient and modern periods from Asia and the Americas. METHODS: Images published in the original article were analyzed using geometric morphometrics methods. Shape variables were used to perform Principal Component and Discriminant analysis against the reference samples. RESULTS: Even thought the Principal Component Analysis suggests that the Hoyo Negro skull falls in a subregion of the morphospace occupied by both ?Paleoamericans? and some modern Native Americans, the Discriminant analyses suggest greater affinity with a modern Native American sample. DISCUSSION: These results reinforce the idea that the original population that first occupied the New World carried high levels of within-group variation, which we have suggested previously on a synthetic model for the settlement of the Americas. Our results also highlight the importance of developing formal classificatory test before deriving settlement hypothesis purely based on macroscopic descriptions. Am J Phys Anthropol 158:514? 521, 2015. VC 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.