title: Evolutionary population history of early Paleoamerican cranial morphology.
abstract: The nature and timing of the peopling of the Americas is a subject of intense debate. In particular, it is unclear whether high levels of between-group craniometric diversity in South America result from multiple migrations or from local diversification processes. Previous attempts to explain this diversity have largely focused on testing alternative dispersal or gene flow models, reaching conflicting or inconclusive results. Here, a novel analytical framework is applied to three-dimensional geometric morphometric data to partition the effects of population divergence from geographically mediated gene flow to understand the ancestry of the early South Americans in the context of global human history. The results show that Paleoamericans share a last common ancestor with contemporary Native American groups outside, rather than inside, the Americas. Therefore, and in accordance with some recent genomic studies, craniometric data suggest that the New World was populated by multiple waves of dispersion from northeast Asia throughout the late Pleistocene and early Holocene.
authors.affiliation: Buffalo Human Evolutionary Morphology Lab, Department of Anthropology, University at Buffalo, 380 MFAC, Ellicott Complex, Buffalo, NY 14261, USA.
authors.forename: Noreen
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: von Cramon-Taubadel
authors.affiliation: Department of Human Evolution, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Deutscher Platz 6, D-04103 Leipzig, Germany.; Paleoanthropology, Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Paleoenvironment, Eberhard Karls Universität, Tübingen, Tübingen D-72070, Germany.
authors.forename: André
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Strauss
authors.affiliation: Instituto de Arqueología y Antropología, Universidad Católica del Norte, San Pedro de Atacama, Chile.; Department of Anthropology, Ohio State University, 4048 Smith Laboratory, 174 West 18th Avenue, Columbus, OH 43210, USA.
authors.forename: Mark
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Hubbe
mesh_terms: D002508:Cephalometry; D005260:Female; D049690:History, Ancient; D006801:Humans; D007199:Indians, South American; D008297:Male; D012886:Skull / Q000033:anatomy & histology*; D013020:South America
keywords: cranial shape; geometric morphometrics; peopling of Americas; population history