In Canada, Native Americans are called First Nations. But what if American Indians were neither native to the New World nor first?

Or what if they were first in North America but second in South America?

“Who We Are: #6 The Americas

Posted on April 12, 2018 by gcochran9

… Back to the new world. This picture was nice and simple, but there was a fly in the ointment. Isn’t there always? A Brazilian anthropologist, Walter Neves, had studied a number of old skeletons in Brazil that looked different. The most famous of these was Luzia Woman, about 11.500 years old. Neves and others thought that she ( and other similar skeletons) looked more like Australo-Melanesians than Amerindians. Reich is dismissive of Neves’ scientific credentials – ” If I don’ know it, it’s not knowledge” – but Neves was on to something important. One of Reich’s students, Pontus Skoglund, looked more closely at native American genetic data to look for traces of a different ancestral group. He found them. Parenthetically, I’ve heard that other people had seen something weird in those Amazonian genetic samples even earlier, but seem to have thought it was too weird to publish

Some populations of Brazilian Indians were genetically closer to Australasians than to other world populations – the general group that Neves and other anthropologists had said the old Brazilian skeletons resembled. The population with the greatest affinity were the Andaman islanders, short dark people that live on islands between India and Burma.

Several of the Amazonian tribes they looked at had this admixture, at a few-percent level: the Surui, Karitiana, and Xavante. It has since been found in some other groups in or near the Amazonian basin.

Some obvious attempts at an explanation don’t work. That genetic trace isn’t from Polynesians – not a good genetic match, and the admixture is old, while the Polynesian expansion into the Pacific is recent.

The pattern of the populations that don’t have this pseudo-Andamanese admixture is illuminating. You don’t see it in the eastern branch of Amerindians, You don’t see it most of the current southern branch ( i.e. central America and South America west of the Andes). You don’t see it in ancient members of the southern branch (The Clovis-complex Anzick-1 skeleton from Montana, about 12.6k years old). You don’t see it in a Beringian that was left behind in Alaska (about 11k years old).

How can you see it in Brazil if it wasn’t already there in Beringia? Or in the early expansion out of Beringia? Or in Central America?

Because these pseudo-Andamanese were there first, before the Amerindians ever got south of the glaciers. And were then seriously stomped by Amerindians, as has happened so often in prehistory.