The Sunday Times (UK)
http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/Sunday-Times/stifgnusa02003.html?999
August 22 1999
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 Asia,
Australia and Melanesia. "They are similar to
modern-day Aborigines and Africans and show no
similarities at all with Mongoloids from east Asia
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 Asia.
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 European 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.
