Old World sources of the first New World human inhabitants: A comparative craniofacial view

Human craniofacial data were used to assess the similarities and difference s between recent and prehistoric old World samples, and between these sampl es and a similar representation of samples from the New World. The data wer e analyzed by the neighbor-joining clustering procedure, assisted by bootst rapping and by canonical discriminant analysis score plots. The first entra nts to the Western Hemisphere of maybe 15,000 years ago gave rise to the co ntinuing native inhabitants south of the U.S.-Canadian border. These show n o close association with any known mainland Asian population. Instead they show ties to the Ainu of Hokkaido and their Jomon predecessors in prehistor ic Japan and to the Polynesians of remote Oceania. All of these also have t ies to the Pleistocene and recent inhabitants of Europe and may represent a n extension from a Late Pleistocene continuum of people across the northern fringe of the Old World. With roots in both the northwest and the northeas t, these people can be described as Eurasian. The route of entry to the New World was at the northwestern edge. In contrast, the Inuit (Eskimo), the A leut, and the Na-Dene speakers who had penetrated as far as the American So uthwest within the last 1,000 years show more similarities to the mainland populations of East Asia. Although both the earlier and later arrivals in t he New World show a mixture of traits characteristic of the northern edge o f Old World occupation and the Chinese core of mainland Asia, the proportio n of the latter is greater for the more recent entrants.