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Reuters carried a story today that the bone of a woman who lived 11,500 years ago was from an African, suggesting that global navigation and cultural diffusion was more robust than anyone had expected. The fossil was first discovered in 1975 in the state of Minas Gerias, was found buried at the bottom of a 43 foot cavern. The single fossil consists of a skull with "round eyes, large nose and pronounced chin" characteristic of Australian aboriginals and native Africans.
About a year ago, archaeologist Walter Neves, one of the few specialists in human paleontology in Brazil, re-examined the fossil, noticing the unusual shape of skull. His expertise identified the skull as having Negroid, rather than Mongoloid features (which are typical of Brazil's Indians).
"Its characteristics are very different in relation to the native population. Therefore, it has an very big importance, above all in explaining the settlement of the Americas and also for the history of humanity," said Jose Henrique Vilhena, UFRJ's rector.The present theory holds to the belief that the earliest Americans were the Asian ancestors of the Indians that European colonizers encountered when they arrived on the American continents 500 years ago. These ancestors would have come from what we now Siberia and Mongolia, crossing the Bering Straight between Asia and North America on a glacial bridge at the end of the last ice age (estimated to have been 13,000 years ago).
This new finding does not disprove the currently held theories but suggests that other options for travel, specifically oceanic travel, were utilized. The announcement is seen by some people as proof of a more sophisticated culture in humanities past and begs to ask how this culture seems to have declined and been forgotten. The fossil has been scanned for tomographic data and a new process will hopefully be able to create a sculpture of what the middle-aged woman looked like. The sculpture and fossil will remain on display at the National Museum in Rio de Janerio.
June 8, 1999: Santa Barbara, California. "This woman probably belonged to a band of people that were not necessarily hunting mammoths, but were living along the coasts, hunting, fishing, gathering shellfish," says John Johnson, curator of Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. "We can't tell what genetic background this woman had, because there's no DNA present." Nevertheless, the discovery that the bones, according to Johnson, proves that navigation by boat was well established at a time when the last ice age is to have suddenly ended.
If a community of humans could live on the Channel Islands then they must have been able to commute with the mainland across the Santa Barbara Channel. If this feat was possible then there is really nothing to inhibit rapid migrations along the coasts of the Americas. And trans-oceanic navigation remains a very likely possibility.
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