Abstract
Coordinate data analysis of ancient crania from the New World reveals complexity in interpretation when addressing ancient population dispersals. The results of this study generally support a geographic patterning for the New World; however, it also revealed a much more complex and multifactorial mechanism shaping craniofacial morphology that should be considered when investigating ecogeographic models for hominin dispersals. We show that craniofacial variation is not the result of a single mechanism but is a much more complex interaction of environmental and microevolutionary forces.
Highlights
Linguistic classification[21], along with archaeological and biological data, have contributed to hypotheses and interpretations related to origins[22,23,24,25], migration routes[26], and the general number of migrations involved[27,28,29,30] for the peopling of the New World
A complex mechanism for pre-contact New World craniofacial variation is revealed showing multifactorial forces from spatial/geographic distribution, altitude, and climate, as well as demic diffusion and drift modeling morphology in a sample of 257 individuals from 10 localities using 16 homologous anatomical landmarks (Fig. 1, Tables 1, 2, see Materials and Methods section; the raw coordinate data used in this study are available in the Supplementary file)
Earlier studies using traditional craniometrics[38,39] demonstrated that the highland Peruvian samples showed less within-sample variation, as did the coastal samples; the coastal to highland groups displayed more between-group variation. This pattern suggests that the Andes mountain range may have acted as a barrier to gene flow, which is evident in the morphological separation observed between the Southern Chilean sample and the Patagonian sample
Summary
Linguistic classification[21], along with archaeological and biological data, have contributed to hypotheses and interpretations related to origins[22,23,24,25], migration routes[26], and the general number of migrations involved[27,28,29,30] for the peopling of the New World. Others argue for a coastal Pacific migration based on the coastal distribution of the rare D-subtype D4h3 found in North and South America and stress that human dispersals were more complex than genetic studies of modern populations suggest[34,35]. These genetic studies are not without bias as many lump available ancient skeletal samples into a single sample with a large proportion of these genetic modellings being based on extant populations and not ancient ones[36]. We propose multifactorial evidence for Pre-Contact craniofacial morphological variation that supports more than one mechanism influencing morphology, which can be used as a baseline for future studies
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