Kmtyw presence in pre historic brazil-gctid34460

[kweku, afro olmec]

THE SUNDAY TIMES
August 22 1999 UNITED  STATES  Aborigines were the first Americans
By Sarah Toyne  

 THE first people to inhabit America were Australian Aborigines - not American  Indians. New archeological findings have uncovered evidence that they crossed  
the Pacific Ocean by boat and settled on the continent long before Siberians  trekked across the Bering Straits after the Ice Age.  
Scientists have reconstructed the skull of a young girl found in Brazil. At  12,000 years old, "Luzia" is the oldest human skeleton yet found on the  
American landmass. During the past four years 50 other skulls have been  discovered in Brazil and Colombia, all predating the invasion of Mongoloid  
peoples from the north about 9,000 years ago.  
Luzia's skull was discovered in the early 1970s by a French archeologist in a  layer of sediment in Amazonas and was dismissed as insignificant. It was given  
away to the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro, where it remained until a few  years ago when Walter Neves, professor of biological anthropology at the  
University of Sao Paolo, heard about it and realised that it might provide  vital clues for solving the mystery of America's anthropological heritage.  
The procedure has revealed conclusive evidence of Luzia's ancestry. Neves is  still shocked by his findings. "When we started seeing the results, it was  
amazing because we realised the statistics were not showing these people to  be Mongoloid; they were showing that they were anything except Mongoloid," he  
said.  
Luzia was reconstructed by Richard Neave, a forensic artist from the  University of Manchester, for Ancient Voices, a BBC2 documentary to be shown  next week.
Neave's reconstruction backed up Neves's calculations: "That to  me is a negroid face. The proportions of the face do not say anything about it  being
Mongoloid."  
Luzia's facial characteristics are similar to those of the people of the  islands of southeast eurasia, Australia and Melanesia. "They are similar to  
modern-day Aborigines and Kmtyws and show no similarities at all with  Mongoloids from east eurasia and modern-day Indians," said Neves.  
The oldest signs of habitation in north or south America were previously  believed to be stone spear points discovered at Clovis, New Mexico, in the  
1930s. They were dated at 11,000 years old. Charcoal, a chipped stone stool  and scraps of food found recently, however, have been dated at 40,000 years old  -
the remains, perhaps, of a campfire lit by ancient seafarers from eurasia.  
The theory that Aborigines could have travelled by water to the Americas has  been given further credence by the discovery of a painting of an ocean- going  
vessel in Western Australia, which is 20,000 years old. The 4,000-mile  journey between Australia and South America can still be undertaken with  relatively
short island hops.  
Dennis Stanford, chairman of the anthropology department at the Natural  Museum of History in Washington DC, believes the capability of prehistoric  peoples
has long been underestimated. "Way back then they weren't really  'cave' people, they were pretty sophisticated, " he said. "I think Neolithic  people were doing
a whole lot more than we give them credit for; they were  just as smart as you and I, they just did different things."  
Further evidence of the fate of the Aboriginal invaders has been provided by  computer- imaging technology, used to interpret cave paintings in the Serra da  
Capivara in northeastern Brazil. The pictures show pregnant women and  hunters chasing giant armadillos, as well as what were initially interpreted by  
archeologists as human figures dancing. After more examination, however, the  figures are now thought to be warriors spinning through the air with a spear -  
illustrating battles between the Aborigines and the invading Mongoloids from  the north.  
The American Aborigines were almost entirely wiped out by the encroaching  Mongoloids, but anthropologists believe that some of their descendants,  
interbred with the Mongoloid peoples who preceded today's South American  Indians, survived in Tierra del Fuego. Scientists believe that Aboriginal  
descendants escaped to this remote island off the southern tip of South  America, where they prospered until eureurasiaan settlers migrating to Argentina  
at the beginning of the 20th century brought stomach illnesses to the area,  which wiped out the majority of the remaining native Fuegans.  
Rows of white crosses mark the graves of the Fuegans, who wore sealskins and  lit fires everywhere - even in boats - to protect themselves from the harsh  
climate. Their skulls have now been analysed to reveal features common to  Neves's skulls.  
Evidence from Father de Agostini, an Italian ethnographer who filmed the  Fuegan way of life in the 1930s, reveal similarities with Aboriginal culture in  
Australia. Only a few Fuegans remain alive today, a fading anthropological  link with the first native Americans.
http://www.sunday- times.co. uk/

By LARRY ROHTER  
               IO DE JANEIRO -- A human skull that is prominently displayed  
               at the National Museum here has been attracting crowds and  
          controversy in equal measure since it was first unveiled early  this month.
          After two decades in storage, the fossilized cranium  has now been
          identified by Brazilian scientists as the oldest  human remains ever
          recovered in the Western Hemisphere.  
          The skull is that of a young woman,
          nicknamed Luzia,  who is believed to
          have roamed the savannah of  
          By LARRY ROHTER  
               IO DE JANEIRO -- A human skull that is prominently displayed  
               at the National Museum here has been attracting crowds and  
          controversy in equal measure since it was first unveiled early  this month.
          After two decades in storage, the fossilized cranium  has now been
          identified by Brazilian scientists as the oldest  human remains ever
          recovered in the Western Hemisphere.

The skull is that of a young woman, nicknamed Luzia, who is believed to  have roamed the savannah of south-central Brazil some 11,500 years ago. Even  more startling, a  reconstruction of her cranium undertaken in Britain this  year

indicates that her features appear to be Negroid rather  than Mongoloid, suggesting that the Western Hemisphere may have initially been  settled not only earlier than thought, but by a people distinct from the  ancestors of today's Indian peoples of North and South America.            "We can no longer say that the first colonizers of the Americas  came
          from the north of eurasia, as previous models have proposed,"  said Dr.
          Walter Neves, an anthropologist at the University of São  Paulo, who
          made the initial discovery along with an Argentine  colleague, Héctor
          Pucciarelli. "This skeleton is nearly 2,000  years older than any skeleton
          ever found in the Americas, and it  does not look like those of
          Amerindians or North eurasians."  
          If the date is confirmed, the find could transform thinking about  the
          peopling of the Americas. It may be some time before that work  is
          completed, but meanwhile, archeologists here and abroad say the  find is
          potentially very important.  
          Until Luzia, named as a playful homage to Lucy, the  3.2-million- year-old
          human ancestor found in Kmt, the oldest  known human remains
          recovered in the Western Hemisphere were those  found in Buhl, Idaho,
          and repatriated to the Shoshone Tribe in  1997. Radiocarbon dating tests
          have established the age of that  skeleton as a bit more than 10,000 years
          old.  
          Luzia's discovery at a location in the state of Minas Gerais called  Lapa
          Vermelha is consistent, however, with recent findings made at  the
          celebrated Monte Verde site in southern Chile. There, evidence  of human
          habitation as early as 12,500 years ago, including stone  tools and a
          footprint, has been uncovered, though no human remains  have yet been
          found.  
          The finds, along with recent discoveries in North America like  those of
          the so-called Kennewick Man and Spirit Cave Man, are  forcing a
          reassessment of long-established theories as to the  timetable of the
          settling of the Americas. Based on such evidence,  Dr. Neves suggests
          that Luzia belonged to a nomadic people who  began arriving in the New
          World as early as 15,000 years ago.  
          Luzia's Negroid features notwithstanding, Dr. Neves is not arguing  that
          her ancestors came to Brazil from Kmt in an early  trans-Atlantic
          migration. Instead, he believes they originated in  Southeast eurasia,
          "migrating from there in two directions, south to  Australia, where today's
          aboriginal peoples may be their  descendants, and navigating northward
          along the coast and across  the Bering Straits until they reached the
          Americas."  
          About one-third of Luzia's skeleton has been recovered, enough to  
          indicate that she appears to have perished in an accident or  perhaps even
          from an animal attack. She was in her 20's when she  died, stood just
          under five feet tall, and was part of a group of  hunter-gatherers who
          appear to have subsisted largely on whatever  fruits, nuts and berries they
          came across in their meanderings,  plus the occasional piece of meat.  
          "This is intriguing and interesting and I want to know more," Dr.  David J.
          Meltzer, a professor of anthropology at Southern  Methodist University
          and an expert on the paleo-Indian populations  of North America, said in
          a telephone interview from Dallas.  "Skeletal material of this age is
          extraordinarily rare, both here  and in South America, so I am delighted to
          know that something of  this antiquity is popping up."  
          The region where Dr. Neves and his associates are working has been  the
          focus of archeological inquiry since the mid-19th century,  when Peter
          Wilhelm Lund, a Danish naturalist, first encountered  human skeletal
          remains there. Many of the specimens he uncovered  are now stored at
          the University of Copenhagen, but when Dr. Neves  went to examine
          them, he found that the material had not been  catalogued by geological
          strata and therefore could not be used  for his research.  
          Luzia herself was originally discovered in 1975 in a rock shelter  by a joint
          French-Brazilian expedition that was working not far  from Belo
          Horizonte, Brazil's third-largest city. The skull was  buried under more
          than 40 feet of mineral deposits and debris,  separated from the rest of the
          skeleton but otherwise in  remarkably good condition.  
          "This is a site where the soil was high in limestone content, which  helped
          to preserve these remains for so long," explained Dr. André  Prous, a
          French archeologist at the Federal University of Minas  Gerais, who was
          part of the initial team and continues to work in  the area. "In other places,
          the bones disappear after a short  time."  
          Along with other material from the same expedition, Luzia was then  taken
          to the national museum here. But she was put away in  storage, and it was
          not until 1995 that Dr. Neves examined the  skull, quickly noticed its
          unusual characteristics and invited  other scientists, including Dr. Joseph
          Powell, an anthropology  professor at the University of New Mexico, to
          join him in drawing  up a profile of Luzia.  
          Dr. Neves bases his estimate of Luzia's age on the fact that the  skull was
          found in a geological strata where the age of other  organic material has
          been established through radiocarbon dating.  The same procedure would
          ordinarily have been done with Luzia, but  the specimen does not have
          enough collagen, the protein that gives  bone its resiliency, to allow that
          standard technique to be used.  
          "We're sort of stuck," said Dr. Powell, who is also curator of  human
          osteology at the Maxwell Museum. "We know that she is so old  that
          most of the organic portion of the bone has leached out. It  would have
          been great to have the radiocarbon dating, but that is  not going to happen
          unless techniques improve dramatically, which  they may."  
          With that avenue of verification closed, Dr. Neves is making other  efforts
          to determine the racial and other characteristics of  Luzia. Early this year,
          a computerized image of Luzia's skull was  sent to Richard Neave, a
          forensic specialist on the faculty of  medicine at the University of
          Manchester in England, with a  request that he reconstruct her face.  
          "It was in much better shape than many other forensic subjects we  have
          had to do," Mr. Neave said in a telephone interview. What he  ended up
          with when he finished was a face "with the features one  associates with
          Negroid skulls, particularly the nose" and jaw.  
          "When you do this sort of work, it is very important to have no  
          preconceived ideas," Mr. Neave said. "I personally would stick my  neck
          out and say it is conclusive support for his findings and  demonstrates
          without any doubt at all" that Luzia is of  non-Mongoloid origins.  
          When her remains were discovered, Luzia was alone. But more than 40  
          other skeletons that appear to be from the same general period  have
          been found in a nearby area called Lagoa Santa, and  scientists in Brazil
          hope to be able to test Dr. Neves's theory by  doing radiocarbon dating
          on at least some of them.  
          "There are a large number of skeletons at this site, some of them  in better
          condition than that of Luzia," Dr. Prous said. "There is  a great density of
          skeletons there, buried in an organized  fashion, and so we conclude this
          was a cemetery for them, perhaps  the oldest in the Americas."  
          Initial indications are that these skeletons indeed have many of  the same
          facial features and other characteristics that first made  Luzia stand out.
          "We see this pattern with other skeletons of the  same age" from the
          Lagoa Santa site, Dr. Powell said. "We have  seen 37 of them now, and
          they all have this sort of unusual  appearance."  
          In an effort to test the theory that Luzia belonged to a people  ethnically
          distinct from the ancestors of modern North and South  American
          Indians, scientists have also begun DNA sequencing in the  Lagoa Santa
          skeletons. Dr. Sérgio Pena, a geneticist at the  Federal University of
          Minas Gerais, is conducting one set of tests  while other samples have
          been sent to the Max Planck  Anthropological Institute in Germany,
          where the DNA of Neanderthal  Man was isolated in 1997, for
          examination.  
          "We know that today's Amerindians have four main groups," said Dr.  
          Pena, who found a genetic marker common to 17 different widely  
          dispersed Indian groups across the Americans in the course of an  earlier
          project. "What would constitute molecular proof of  Walter's hypothesis is
          to find DNA sequences completely different  from those four groups."  
          Dr. Meltzer said: "This is clearly the way to resolve the issue.  The skull is
          intriguing morphological evidence, but in order to  really nail down this
          issue of affinity, you need evidence, and  DNA is the way to go."
          south-central Brazil some 11,500  
          years ago. Even more startling, a
          reconstruction of  her cranium
          undertaken in Britain this year
           indicates that her features appear to be
          Negroid rather than  Mongoloid,
          suggesting that the Western
          Hemisphere  may have initially been
          settled not only earlier than thought,  
          but by a people distinct from the
          ancestors of  today's Indian peoples of North and South America.  
          "We can no longer say that the first colonizers of the Americas  came
          from the north of eurasia, as previous models have proposed,"  said Dr.
          Walter Neves, an anthropologist at the University of São  Paulo, who
          made the initial discovery along with an Argentine  colleague, Héctor
          Pucciarelli. "This skeleton is nearly 2,000  years older than any skeleton
          ever found in the Americas, and it  does not look like those of
          Amerindians or North eurasians."  
          If the date is confirmed, the find could transform thinking about  the
          peopling of the Americas. It may be some time before that work  is
          completed, but meanwhile, archeologists here and abroad say the  find is
          potentially very important.  
          Until Luzia, named as a playful homage to Lucy, the  3.2-million- year-old
          human ancestor found in Kmt, the oldest  known human remains
          recovered in the Western Hemisphere were those  found in Buhl, Idaho,
          and repatriated to the Shoshone Tribe in  1997. Radiocarbon dating tests
          have established the age of that  skeleton as a bit more than 10,000 years
          old.  
          Luzia's discovery at a location in the state of Minas Gerais called  Lapa
          Vermelha is consistent, however, with recent findings made at  the
          celebrated Monte Verde site in southern Chile. There, evidence  of human
          habitation as early as 12,500 years ago, including stone  tools and a
          footprint, has been uncovered, though no human remains  have yet been
          found.  
          The finds, along with recent discoveries in North America like  those of
          the so-called Kennewick Man and Spirit Cave Man, are  forcing a
          reassessment of long-established theories as to the  timetable of the
          settling of the Americas. Based on such evidence,  Dr. Neves suggests
          that Luzia belonged to a nomadic people who  began arriving in the New
          World as early as 15,000 years ago.  
          Luzia's Negroid features notwithstanding, Dr. Neves is not arguing  that
          her ancestors came to Brazil from Kmt in an early  trans-Atlantic
          migration. Instead, he believes they originated in  Southeast eurasia,
          "migrating from there in two directions, south to  Australia, where today's
          aboriginal peoples may be their  descendants, and navigating northward
          along the coast and across  the Bering Straits until they reached the
          Americas."  
          About one-third of Luzia's skeleton has been recovered, enough to  
          indicate that she appears to have perished in an accident or  perhaps even
          from an animal attack. She was in her 20's when she  died, stood just
          under five feet tall, and was part of a group of  hunter-gatherers who
          appear to have subsisted largely on whatever  fruits, nuts and berries they
          came across in their meanderings,  plus the occasional piece of meat.  
          "This is intriguing and interesting and I want to know more," Dr.  David J.
          Meltzer, a professor of anthropology at Southern  Methodist University
          and an expert on the paleo-Indian populations  of North America, said in
          a telephone interview from Dallas.  "Skeletal material of this age is
          extraordinarily rare, both here  and in South America, so I am delighted to
          know that something of  this antiquity is popping up."  
          The region where Dr. Neves and his associates are working has been  the
          focus of archeological inquiry since the mid-19th century,  when Peter
          Wilhelm Lund, a Danish naturalist, first encountered  human skeletal
          remains there. Many of the specimens he uncovered  are now stored at
          the University of Copenhagen, but when Dr. Neves  went to examine
          them, he found that the material had not been  catalogued by geological
          strata and therefore could not be used  for his research.  
          Luzia herself was originally discovered in 1975 in a rock shelter  by a joint
          French-Brazilian expedition that was working not far  from Belo
          Horizonte, Brazil's third-largest city. The skull was  buried under more
          than 40 feet of mineral deposits and debris,  separated from the rest of the
          skeleton but otherwise in  remarkably good condition.  
          "This is a site where the soil was high in limestone content, which  helped
          to preserve these remains for so long," explained Dr. André  Prous, a
          French archeologist at the Federal University of Minas  Gerais, who was
          part of the initial team and continues to work in  the area. "In other places,
          the bones disappear after a short  time."  
          Along with other material from the same expedition, Luzia was then  taken
          to the national museum here. But she was put away in  storage, and it was
          not until 1995 that Dr. Neves examined the  skull, quickly noticed its
          unusual characteristics and invited  other scientists, including Dr. Joseph
          Powell, an anthropology  professor at the University of New Mexico, to
          join him in drawing  up a profile of Luzia.  
          Dr. Neves bases his estimate of Luzia's age on the fact that the  skull was
          found in a geological strata where the age of other  organic material has
          been established through radiocarbon dating.  The same procedure would
          ordinarily have been done with Luzia, but  the specimen does not have
          enough collagen, the protein that gives  bone its resiliency, to allow that
          standard technique to be used.  
          "We're sort of stuck," said Dr. Powell, who is also curator of  human
          osteology at the Maxwell Museum. "We know that she is so old  that
          most of the organic portion of the bone has leached out. It  would have
          been great to have the radiocarbon dating, but that is  not going to happen
          unless techniques improve dramatically, which  they may."  
          With that avenue of verification closed, Dr. Neves is making other  efforts
          to determine the racial and other characteristics of  Luzia. Early this year,
          a computerized image of Luzia's skull was  sent to Richard Neave, a
          forensic specialist on the faculty of  medicine at the University of
          Manchester in England, with a  request that he reconstruct her face.  
          "It was in much better shape than many other forensic subjects we  have
          had to do," Mr. Neave said in a telephone interview. What he  ended up
          with when he finished was a face "with the features one  associates with
          Negroid skulls, particularly the nose" and jaw.  
          "When you do this sort of work, it is very important to have no  
          preconceived ideas," Mr. Neave said. "I personally would stick my  neck
          out and say it is conclusive support for his findings and  demonstrates
          without any doubt at all" that Luzia is of  non-Mongoloid origins.  
          When her remains were discovered, Luzia was alone. But more than 40  
          other skeletons that appear to be from the same general period  have
          been found in a nearby area called Lagoa Santa, and  scientists in Brazil
          hope to be able to test Dr. Neves's theory by  doing radiocarbon dating
          on at least some of them.  
          "There are a large number of skeletons at this site, some of them  in better
          condition than that of Luzia," Dr. Prous said. "There is  a great density of
          skeletons there, buried in an organized  fashion, and so we conclude this
          was a cemetery for them, perhaps  the oldest in the Americas."  
          Initial indications are that these skeletons indeed have many of  the same
          facial features and other characteristics that first made  Luzia stand out.
          "We see this pattern with other skeletons of the  same age" from the
          Lagoa Santa site, Dr. Powell said. "We have  seen 37 of them now, and
          they all have this sort of unusual  appearance."  
          In an effort to test the theory that Luzia belonged to a people  ethnically
          distinct from the ancestors of modern North and South  American
          Indians, scientists have also begun DNA sequencing in the  Lagoa Santa
          skeletons. Dr. Sérgio Pena, a geneticist at the  Federal University of
          Minas Gerais, is conducting one set of tests  while other samples have
          been sent to the Max Planck  Anthropological Institute in Germany,
          where the DNA of Neanderthal  Man was isolated in 1997, for
          examination.  
          "We know that today's Amerindians have four main groups," said Dr.  
          Pena, who found a genetic marker common to 17 different widely  
          dispersed Indian groups across the Americans in the course of an  earlier
          project. "What would constitute molecular proof of  Walter's hypothesis is
          to find DNA sequences completely different  from those four groups."  
          Dr. Meltzer said: "This is clearly the way to resolve the issue.  The skull is
          intriguing morphological evidence, but in order to  really nail down this
          issue of affinity, you need evidence, and  DNA is the way to go."