Australoid Race - The First Americans?

The First Americans?

Skulls of peoples with Australoid morphologies have been found in the Americas, leading to speculation that peoples with phenotypical similarities to modern Australoids may have been the earliest occupants of the continent. These have been termed by some Pre-Siberian American Aborigines. If this theory is correct, it would mean that some Proto-Australoids continued the Great Coastal Migration beyond Southeast Asia along the continental shelf north in East Asia and across the Bering land bridge, reaching the Americas about 52,000 BCE.

Christy Turner notes that "cranial analyses of some South American crania have suggested that there might have been some early migration of "Australoids." These early Americans left signs of settlement in Brazil which may date back as many as 50,000 years ago. However, Turner argues that cranial morphology suggests "Sinodonty" in all the populations he has studied.

One of the earliest skulls recovered by archaeologists is a specimen named Luzia. According to archaeologist Walter Neves of the University of São Paulo, Luzia's Paleo-Indian predecessors lived in South East Asia for tens of thousands of years, after migrating from Africa, and began arriving in the New World, as early as 15,000 years ago. Some anthropologists have hypothesized that Paleo-Indians migrated along the coast of East Asia and Beringia in small watercraft, before or during the last Ice Age.

Neves' conclusions have been challenged by research done by anthropologists Rolando Gonzalez-Jose, Frank Williams and William Armelagos who have shown in their studies that the cranio-facial variability could just be due to genetic drift and other factors affecting cranio-facial plasticity in Native Americans.