This news release has just enough in it to be intriguing, but lacks enough detail for me to comment much on it. Researchers in Brazil have studied 81 Paleoindian (11,000 - 7,500 BP) skulls from the Lagoa Santa region of that country and find that their features - long narrow crania, projecting jaws, and low, broad eye sockets and noses - are drastically different from those of Native Americans. They characterize them as more similar to modern Australians (aborigines, I assume), Melanesians, and sub-Saharan Africans.
Much was made of the characterization of Kennewick Man's (9,300 BP) features as "Caucasoid" a few years ago, so I'm sure that this will cause a stir as well. The Brazilians believe that this indicates a wave of migration from Asia earlier than that of the Mongolian types that are the ancestors of modern American Indians.
I will have to take a look at the journal article when it comes out next week to comment intelligently, but this appears to be another in a wave of discoveries relating to the peopling of the Americas that show it was a very complicated series of events. Right now there is more new data coming out than can be fit in our theoretical frameworks. It is an exciting time but a confusing one. Charles Mann's new book 1491 has a chapter on the peopling of the Americas that gives a decent run-down of many of the competing theories, but it also shows the disarray that all this unassimilated new data has caused.
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