54. Possible Relatives in the Americas

Fuegian and Patagonian Genetics -
and the settling of the Americas

by George Weber

Fuegian skull (drawn in the 19th century).

Pre-Columbian America is not the single, unbroken, huge Amerindian territory that has been claimed until recently. The Amerinds (followed by the Inuit and Aleuts) did not enter a "new world" completely uninhabited by humans.

That the Aleuts and Inuit Eskimo from Siberia have been the most recent pre-Columbian arrivals before the post-Columbian European (and African!) invasion has been known for a long time.But these people were obviously not Amerinds and lived more or less out of sight in the remote far north. That the Na-Dene arrived before the Aleut-Inuit but after the Amerinds-proper has also been known for a while but since they were very similar to the Amerinds-proper, that did not pose a threat to the "First Americans" theory.

What has been realized only very recently on the basis of DNA analyses is that there must have been earlier waves of "Paleoamerinds" although the number of these earlier arrivals must have been small and their archaeological sites few and hard to find.

The existence of Americans "before the first Americans" has not fully sunk in everywhere. Indeed, there is fierce resistance against the very idea by US Amerind groups who stand to lose their "First American" status and also could find themselves confronted with the very same accusation that they have (rightly) hurled at the Europeans: that they had evicted other, earlier people from their lands and perhaps had even tried to exterminate them. Transferring persent-day moralities into prehistoric people is always a futile excercise that can lead into deep and troubled waters. One can sympathize with the Amerinds who have indeed much to feel aggrieved about. Sympathy should never hinder the collection nor an unprejudiced evaluation of the evidence - unless we want to live in a fantasy world.

Latin-Americans of all colours and races take a far more relaxed attitude than is common in the US. It is not coincidence that it was the Chilean site of Monte Verde that has first threatened the heroic US "Clovis first" fantasy (which was definitively buried only in March 2007 - see Clovis First).

Of course, very many questions remain - but the DNA studies done so far give a clear message: the Fuegians, Patagonians and (most likely the he Pericu ) are not Amerinds. They were in the Americas first. The geographical locations of the suggested five prehistoric American waves of migration also seem to support this view, as does the mitochondrial haplotypes that occur (resp. do not occur) among Fuegians/Patagonians and among Amerinds.

The route that these four or five postulated migratury waves into America took is less certain. If the Australians (as they must have done) could reach Australia over the open sea around 50,000 years ago, a coastal route along the north American coast even in the deepest ice age is conceivable. What is odd about the discussion of the Bering Strait is that walking is usually taken for granted, as if boats along the coast were no option for the first Americans. In fact, as the Yamana and Kwaseqars of Tierra del Fuego demonstrate, the "First Americans" could not only have done their migrations by boat, they could even have done so naked. We must not underestimate the stamina of these ancestors!

When submitted to Matrix Correlation (on skulls) and to materinally-inherited mitochondrial DNA analysis, the Fuegians and Patagonians have turned out to be not Amerinds but a separate population. It certainly looks like they represent the last surviving remnants of the earliest human migration into the Americas. The bold red letters A, B, C, D and N represent the respective mtDNA haplotypes that occur in the various population groups. Note that the Fuegian-Patagonians lack A and B completely. For details see below. The Fuegian and Patagonian languages concentrated in the "Cone" of South America also tell a similar story.

There is a striking distinction between Fuegian-Patagonians on the one hand and the Amerinds on the other hand when mtDNA haplogroups are considered.

In C. Lalueza, A. Perez-Perez, E. Prats, L. Cornudella and D. Turbon, 2007. "Lack of founding Amerindian mitochrondrial DNA lineages in extinct Aborigines from Tierra del Fuego-Patagonia". Human Molecular Genetics (Oxford Journals) 6/1:41-47, a clear distinction becomes apparent between Fuegian and Patagonians on the one side and Amerinds on the other.

The ancient DNA samples of Fuegians and Patagonians were taken from skeletal remains (bones and teeth) of Fuegians and Patagonians. On analysis, it was found that these people completely lacked the A and B groups which are the most common groups among "normal" Amerinds. The authors note that these results, together with the decreasing incidence of the lineage A towards the south and the complete absence of B in the northernmost parts of North America argue that the first humans to enter the Americas 21,000 to 14,000 years ago did not bring A and B with them. These lineages only reached America with the first Amerinds.

It also seems that the the land-living Ona (Selk'nam), also known as "foot Indians" started to split off from the ancestral Patagonian group (which also gave rise to the Tehuelche, land-living, too) around 12-10,000 years ago and became confined to the Great Island of Tierra del Fuego around 6,000 years ago where they remained until their extinction in the 20th century. The boat- and sea-oriented Yamana and Kawesqar are more distantly related to the "foot Indians" and they have been traced to the area back to around 6,000 years ago.

The following table of haplogroup frequences among Amerinds and Fuego-Patagonians is adapted from Lalueza et al.:

Group	Sub-group	Samples	Frequency of mtDNA Haplogroups
			A	B	C	D	N
Amerinds	Na-Dene north	209	92.8 %	0 %	1.4 %	0.5 %	5.3 %
	Na-Dene South	73	60.3 %	30.1 %	4.1 %	2.7 %	2.7 %
	N. Amerinds	224	46.4 %	14.3 %	23.2 %	8.0 %	8.0 %
	C. Amerinds	261	46.4 %	34.5 %	18.4 %	0.4 %	0.4 %
	S. Amerinds	676	8.3 %	37.9 &	20.8 %	31.8 %	1.2 %
Subtotal Amerinds		1,443
Fuegians	Kawesqar	19	0 %	0 %	15.8 %	84.2 %	0 %
	Yamana	11	0 %	0 %	90.9 %	9.1 %	0 %
	Ona	13	0 %	0 %	46.1 %	46.1 %	7.7 %
	unaffiliated	2	0 %	0 %	0 %	100%	0 %
Patagonians	Aonikenk	15	0 %	0 %	26.7 %	55.6 %	0 %
Subtotal Fuegian-Patagonians		60	0 %	0 %	38.3 %	60 %	1.7 %
Total		1,503

Na-Dene north:
Dogrib, Haida

Na-Dene south:
Apache, Navajo

Northern Amerinds:
Bella Coola, Nuu-Chah-Nulth, Ojibwa, Oneota-Norris Farm, Yakima, Maya

Central Amerinds:
Pima, Mixe, Mixtec-high, Mixtec-low, Zapotec, Boruca, Kina, Guaymi, Bribri-Cabecar, Teribe, Guatso

Southern Amerinds:
Piaroa, Makiritare, Macushi, Yanomamo, Wapishana, Ticuna, Marubo, Kraho, Mataco, Quechua, Aymara, Atacama, Pehuenche, Huilliche, Mapuche

There is evidence pointing in the same direction as DNA comimng from a completely different approach. Craniometric samples on the Fuegian Ona (16 skulls) and Yamana (44 skulls) and on the San Jorge Gulf Patagonian southern Tehuelche or Aonikenk (38 skulls), the Chubut River Valley Patagonian northern Tehuelche or Künün-a-Güna (70 skulls), the northwestern Argeninian (32 skulls), the northeastern Argentinian (33 skulls) amd the not further identified "Pre-Andean" from the eastern slopes of the Andean mountain chain (20 skulls) were analyzed using multivariate techniques (R.J. Gonzalez, 2001. "The Settlement of Patagonia: a matrix correlation study". Human Biology, April 2001, 73/2:233-248). The study tested the hypothesis of one or two different migration waves in the peopling of the extreme south of South America. Despite their cultural differences, the three hunter-gatherer groups. from Tierra del Fuego tend to cluster together, indicating a similar morphological pattern. This suggests that geographic distance (in latitudinal sense) is the main factor that influenced the differentiation of the human groups from Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia from a single ancestral population.

The groups were found to cluster together as follows;:

A skull found at Pali Aike cave has been analyzed by craniometry (Neves W.A., Powell J.F., Ozolins E.G. 1999.
"Extra-Continental Morphological Affinities of Palli Aike, Southern Chile", Intersciencia, 24/4: 258- 263)
and the conclusions of the authors are interesting. They write:

Although the results obtained in this work are based on one single skeleton, they tend to confirm the initial idea expressed in this paper that the first people to colonize the Americas were not of Mongoloid nature. In this sense our results strongly disagree with those of Munizaga (I 976), who characterized both Pali Aike and Cerro Sota human skeletal remains as typical Mongoloids and with those of Turner and Bird (1981) who found their dentition to be very similar to that of late Amerindians. It is worth noting that Turner and Bird (1981) pooled together teeth from both Pali Aike and Cerro Sota, assuming both materials to be of Paleoindian origin. Today we know, however, that the skeletons from Cerro Sota are dated of late archaic times (Ian Tatersall, personal communication, 1996). Lahr (1995) has reached a conclusion similar to ours when studying the cranial morphology of modern Fuegians. She realized that the morphology of modern Indians of Tierra del Fuego could not be described as typical Mongoloid as well. Since she detected a close association between historic Fuegians and Polynesians she opted to interpret the cranial morphology of the former as generalized Mongoloid, at best. In her opinion this generalized Mongoloid morphology could be explained as a retention of characteristics of the first inhabitants of the Americas. As far as we can draw conclusions from a single skeleton, the fact that Pali Aike aligns with Africans and Australians, instead of with Asians and modern Amerindians is significant in at least two different ways for the current debate about who were the first Americans. First, it shows that people similar to those that inhabited the Lagoa Santa area, in central Brazil, and the area of Sabana de Bogota, in Colombia, once had a wide distribution across South America, reaching even the southernmost region of the sub-continent. Second, but intrinsically related to the first fact, that the non-Mongoloid morphology already demonstrated to occur in tropical and subtropical areas of South America (Neves and Pucciarelli, 1989, 1991; Neves et al., 1993, 1996b, 1998) can also be found in regions characterized by very cold weather. This supports the idea that the relationship of the first known Americans with Africans and Australians cannot be explained in terms of convergent evolution due to similar climatic factors alone. As we have stressed in previous publications, based on better samples sizes, the best way to explain the similarities of the first Americans with Australians under a historical perspective is to admit that both shared a common ancestral population in mainland Asia, at the terminal Pleistocene. Our own investigations had already detected some similarities between the Australians, the first Americans and the people from Zhoukoudian Upper Cave, who lived in China around 20,000 years before the present (Neves and Pucciarelli, 1991, 1998; Neves et al., 1996b). Kamminga and Wright (1988) and Wright (1995) have also suggested a morphological relationship of this late Chinese material with Australomelanesians and not with Mongoloids. The Zhoukoudian Upper Cave people could well be representatives of the ancestral population hypothesized here. As to the similarities with Africans, the best way to explain it in terms of historical connections, is to assume that the Asian ancestral population that gave rise to the Australians and to the first Americans had its ultimate origins in the African continent, as it is in fact the case with all modern humans (Stringer and Andrews, 1988; Stringer and McKie, 1996; Lahr, 1994, 1996), but which retained a very generalized morphology. In accordance with Lahr (1996), the Australians are in fact the contemporary aboriginal population that retained the most primitive morphology when compared to the first modern humans. As she stressed "Groups like [...] Australo-Melanesians are all examples of relatively early diversifications without great amounts of gene flow from other groups..." (Lahr, 1996, p.335). The full article can be found on the internet under http://www.interciencia.org/v24_04/neves.pdf

For more information see:

- http://hmg.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/6/1/41 (full text of article C. Lalueza et al mentioned above)

- http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=pubmed&cmd=Search&itool=pubmed_AbstractPlus&term=%22Garcia%2DBour+J%22%5BAuthor%5D

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Last change 1 March 2007