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

SUBMITTER: von Cramon-Taubadel N 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5321447 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature