A craniofacial perspective on North American Indian population affinities and relations.

Abstract

The prevailing archaeological view suggests a time frame for the early settlement of the New World beginning approximately 12,000 years ago. In all probability, several migration events occurred over a long stretch of time. Population relations have been analyzed on samples drawn from a comparative database of metric dimensions from over 2000 American Indian crania. Tests for shape similarity, including cluster and discriminant function analyses, calculate biological distances between samples representing groups of people living around the world over time. This approach is based in the expectation that people from a given area are more likely to resemble each other than people from other areas not within the local breeding population. This study has produced results suggesting that Amerind groups sort into three broadly related groups distributed across the geography of the New World. These groups may reflect migratory events in the peopling of the hemisphere. A zone running at approximately the 35$\rm\sp{th}$ to 38$\rm\sp{th}$ parallels, and from approximately Virginia across to Northern Arizona, seems to form the northern boundary of a distribution of skeletal samples from southerly situated sites. A second stratum, comprising a central distribution of sites, runs from the Maritime Provinces of Newfoundland and Labrador, across the continent south of Hudson's Bay, and west across the prairie and plains to the Great Basin. The third, or Arctic tier is comprised of the more recent Eskimo, Aleut, Athabascan, and related Navajo and Northern California groups. This picture provides a comparative framework for multidisciplinary examinations of events leading to the original peopling of the New World.