This is a cool short video that will annoy phrenologists and “race realists”. Analysis of a 12,000+ year old skeleton of a young native American woman, now named Naia, who fell into a cenote and died were initially interpreted to imply evidence of multiple migrations into the Americas — the morphologically distinct shape of her skull was used to suggest that she was not ancestral to modern American Indians, but belonged to a separate branch of the family tree.
I’ve heard similar arguments about Kennewick Man, the 8,000+ year old skeleton found in Washington state. His remains looked “caucusoid,” therefore could not be Native American, and therefore laws that protected native remains did not apply. DNA showed otherwise. It turns out that “looks like” is a poor criterion for assigning genetic relatedness.
Same with Naia. DNA testing showed that she really was related to modern South American natives.
Why was her skull so different from the people she was genetically related to? Scientists once thought that distinctive skull shapes were rigid markers of separate ancestries, implying that robust ancient populations in America, and even Australia and Europe, must be genetically distinct from the populations that came later. But Naia proved that the two population theory was wrong. The dramatic differences in skull shape were not due to different blood lines, but to rapid evolutionary adaptation. Scientists now realize that skull shape is highly plastic and changes based on what we do.
I hope that there is a growing appreciation of the concept of phenotypic plasticity — we are products of both our genes and our environment.
Also, that poor girl…dying alone in the dark after a short life of hardship.
Cenotes are common in the Yucatan. Kinda like sinkhole lakes. In Florida we learned of similar horror as a guy was sleeping in his bedroom and got sucked down into the ground.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/mar/01/man-disappears-sinkhole-florida
Wasn’t Franz Boas a proponent of morphological plasticity way back when?
The sinkholes we haven’t checked are full of Nephites and their iron weapons.
Yes. In the early 20th century Boas was hired by Congress to study the cephalic index and found that it could change in a single generation. The Immigration Committee did not like his findings, needless to say. I wrote about it here:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40997106
The study is here:
https://archive.org/details/cu31924029900184
It is the same with cultures.
Different cultures can be produced by the same genetic group of people.
The Paleo-Eskimo cultures of the arctic were diverse and also showed succession, one culture would take over from another culture in time. This was interpreted as multiple waves of people colonizing the arctic.
Genetic analysis shows that they were the same people changing in time and space.
Strangely enough, the modern Eskimos-Inuit are not related to these people. They are latecomers to the arctic.
“There is no doubt that the Inuit ancestors – who crossed the Bering Strait about 1,000 years ago and reached Greenland around 700 years ago – were technologically superior.”
The modern arctic people settled in the arctic late in what would be our historical times.
A question. Considering the unique linguistic traits of the Aleutians, are they solely descended from the inuit or could there have been a mingling of populations?
@ Birger.
I have no idea.
I did ask Google about the genetics of Aleuts.
The short answer is that it is complicated.
.1. Genetically, they aren’t closely related to the modern Eskimo-Inuit.
They crossed into North American a long time ago, 9,000 years.
.2. That they speak a Eskimo-Inuit language could be by adoption somewhere along the line.
.3. Aleut genetics implies that they are their own group. Not part of Native American or Eskimo-Aleut.
.4. They do seem to have a significant inflow of Native American genes though, so mixes.
The genetic link to Na-Dene speakers is strange.
The Navaho and Apache are Na-Dene speakers and live a long way from the arctic.
I went to school back in the Dark Ages with an Aleut from Alaska.
Both his parents were dead.
I asked him once and he said they both died of old age.
Later, it turned out they died from tuberculosis, which was and is common in native Alaskan populations.
Wouldn’t be the first 24th century Frenchman to fall in a hole and wind up a skull in the past—well, after he went through, he would be.
@raven
Na-Dene speakers are scattered. The Navajo and Apache are the furthest south but groups exist in California (e.g., Hupa) and quite a few in western Canada and Alaska (e.g., Tlingit). Which Na-Dene speaking group(s) they are related to is another question.
Erp @9
The Tsuutʼina just west of Calgary are NaDene speakers.
raven @7.
The Navajo and Apache are relative new-comers to the desert southwest, somewhere around 800-1000 C.E.
My first thought was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_cranial_deformation
I wish for better photos of both Naia and the Kennewick skull, because I do not see the ‘dramatic differences in skull shape’ referenced by previous research. Both sets of remains appear to have Siberian/ Asian facial morphology which is entirely consistent with aboriginal Native Americans. Having broad, robust muscle attachments is caused by a lifetime of eating hard foodstuffs that require more bite force than a hamburger.
Of course, cephalic indexes were based in weird racist ideas in the first place. They weren’t considered valid way back in the 80s. It’s too bad it took lawsuits for Kennewick to be returned to his descendants. Hooray for advances in DNA technology.
In several past societies, aristocracies used to bind their children’s skulls to make them frow into abnormal shapes. That way they would always be recognisably ruling class. Nothing to do with genetic differences, it’s completely culturally-driven phenotypic plasticity, even though evolution provided the plasticity in the first place.
Humans evolve to become more fit in their environment and sometimes that environment is the one they create, is an idea I am still getting used to.
In fact, I was quite right: The underlying system of ordinary differential equations happens to be Lipschitz, and since we start with zero thorium, we only have two degrees of freedom in the initial conditions. This is then transformed using a bijective map, which hence preserves non-overlapping of the trajectories in the phase space.
This works unless of course the poor girl ate some thorium…
So tacos make you smart, eh?
I wish I could try some of those…