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An interdisciplinary model for the Peopling of
America
Rolando González-José, Maria Cátira Bortolini,
Fabrício R. Santos, Sandro L. Bonatto
CNP, Puerto Madryn, Argentina, UFRGS. Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil,
UFMG, Belo Horizonte, MG, Brazil; PUC-RS Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil.
Twenty years ago, Greenberg and colleagues (Greenberg
et al. [1986] Curr. Anthropol. 27,477-495) suggested a
multidisciplinary model for the America’s human settlement. Since
their synthesis, a lot of papers mainly based on partial evidence
such as skull morphology or molecular genetics were presented in
different journals as defending ostensibly competing, apparently
mutually exclusive settlement hypotheses. These contradictory views
are articulated in models such the genetic-based “Single Wave” or
“Out of Beringia” and the cranial morphology-based “Two Components/Stocks”,
as well as many other models reflecting particularly scientific
views. Here we present some new interdisciplinary data and analysis
on the Peopling of America study. Implications of this analysis are
synthesized in a model for the settlement of the New World which
considers in an integrative and parsimonious way, evidences coming
from further disciplines like physical anthropology, archaeology,
linguistics and genetics. This model takes into account a founder
population occupying Beringia during the last glaciation,
characterized by a high craniofacial diversity as well as founder
mtDNA and Y-chromosome lineages. After population expansion of
Beringians, which could have been concomitant with their entry into
America likely using innitially a coastal route, a more recent
circum-arctic gene flow, evidenced today by linguistic data, would
have enabled the dispersion of extreme mongoloid characters and some
particular genetic lineages from East Asia to America.
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