Integrating different biological evidences around some microevolutionary processes: bottlenecks and Asian-American arctic gene flow on the New World settlement.

ROLANDO GONZÁLEZ-JOSÉ; MARÍA CÁTIRA BORTOLINI

evolution education and outreach

Springer

Año: 2011 vol. 4 p. 232 - 243

1936-6426

Excepting some specific efforts, most of the mainstream debate around the Americas? settlement was directed by specialists dealing with partial evidence. Thus, discussions were circumscribed to particular academic and scientific environments with limited interchange among archaeologists, physical anthropologist, linguists, geneticists, geologists, paleontologists, etc. As a consequence, integrative views about a process that is complex by definition have been scarce and driven by confrontation rather than by the searching of common results. However, an increasing number of specialists are attempting to integrate different types of data. In our view, a proper way to integrate different data is to set the discussions around evolutionary or cultural processes and the putative patterns that such processes could have generated on the different types of data, which in turns, depends on the nature of data. In this way, the analyses and its conclusions can be interpreted as ?model-bound? rather than purely inferential. In this paper we first provide a brief summary of main differences among the two main sources of biological information: genetics and skull (craniofacial) size and shape, along with the main conclusions that the patterns of genetic and skull variation provide. Further, we exemplify the abovementioned notion by discussing two particular processes and their hypothetical impact on genetic and craniofacial data: the influence of bottlenecks during the early dispersal, and a putative zone of gene-flow among Asian and American Circum Arctic populations.