Sidestep: 4 Skulls

Four of North America's oldest human skulls don't look much alike. Analysis of their variation suggests the story of the First Americans is more complex than once thought.

The story of the First Americans, who they were, and when and how they dispersed across the New World, remains one of the most debated chapters in the human story. Archaeologists, geologists and geneticists, among others, have weighed in with different scenarios. But, so far, only one thing is certain: We've got a lot left to learn.

"Talking about the settlement of the Americas is like building a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle with only about 20 pieces," says Ohio State Universities Mark Hubbe, an anthropologist. "Which means we need to pick up crayons and make our own drawings to complete the gaps between pieces."

Hubbe and colleagues analyzed four of the oldest human skulls found in North America, collected from 2008 to 2015 from underwater caves and sinkholes in the Mexican state of Quintana Roo, just a few miles from popular tourist sites such as the Mayan ruins of Tulum. The team's analysis of the skulls, which date from about 8,500 to 13,500 years old, adds new complexity to the long-running First Americans debate.

"What we are doing with adding this new piece is not changing the pieces we know, but forcing us to consider other ways we could draw the background to fill in the gaps," says Hubbe. That's because, unlike in his previous research on early South Americans, Hubbe documented unusually broad variation between the North American skulls. Simply put, if the First Americans represent a single population, you'd expect them to look like it.

Yet, the evidence in these four individuals shows thats not true.

In fact, comparing the skulls with modern populations, the research team found that one most closely resembled people living in the North American Arctic, while another was most similar to modern Europeans. The other two skulls each had a different mix of features typical of Asian, Native American, South American or Arctic populations. To understand what the four skulls' variation shows - and what it doesn't - let's first revisit the debate itself.

For much of the 20th century, researchers generally believed that the First Americans arrived from Siberia, via the Beringia land bridge, about 13,500 years ago, as ice sheets retreated and opened up a land corridor into the New World. Heaps of more recent archaeological research, however, have muddied that tidy, linear narrative. Archaeological finds — from southern Chile to Idaho, Florida to British Columbia — have shown that humans were in the Americas thousands of years earlier, well before the ice sheets melted and made overland travel possible. An increasing number of researchers believe that people in northern East Asia may have followed the Pacific coast, eastward to North America and then south, all the way to Chile. Even with glaciers meeting the sea across northern stretches of this "kelp highway," the explorers would have found ample marine resources to sustain them, no land needed. Unfortunately, most if not all archaeological evidence that might confirm this hypothesis is, thanks to rising sea levels, now submerged.

Understanding what First Americans looked like — and why they looked different than modern Native Americans — is confounded by a North-South divide. South America is rich in the remains of ancient peoples; North America, not so much. It is frequently assumed that Lagoa Santa represented a good picture of all early Americans (both North and South). In other words, researchers believed, based on available evidence that was largely from South America, that the earliest Americans generally looked like each other. Only over time, for undetermined reasons, did their facial features evolve into those of modern Native American populations.

"The study of the Quintana Roo material shows that this was not the case," Hubbe says. "South and North America have very different histories and these are also reflected in the biological diversity of early Americans."

One thing the Quintana Roo skulls make clear is how many puzzle pieces in the story of the First Americans have yet to be found.

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Why do we at Tangatawhenua16 mention all this? It is simply because assumptions about various groups and races in a particular land are too often assumed, and as we have said often enough that the Melanesians were likely here first, others have said 'show us the evidence' or just laughed at us (including such 'experts as Scott Hamilton), not that we care what others say.

Yet if you were to suggest in 2007 that those from the Quinta Roo region were as different over the ages as those four skulls prove, you would have been laughed at. True? Absolutely true!

And if you said that in 2022 they'd find a skeleton of the rumoured short race of Taiwan legend (1.3 tall), many would, have laughed as well, because... well, they are just legends, right? Yet they found one last last year! That's right... last year!

Once again... absence of evidence does not necessarily equate to evidence of absence. We so much want to rub in the noses of so called 'experts' their words of assumption. Real scientists would consider possibilities. No, not our critics, even only with our revealed femur shaft, but then they don't possess real scientific enquiring minds. And even Brigid Gallagher, an UK born NZ archaeologist, has been proved to have covered up and secreted away vital tall-race evidence as recent as 2007 (and we now know she knows we know she knows).