The First Pacific Crossing 
Brazil Skull Intrigues Scientists
RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (AP) -- The discovery in southeastern Brazil of
an 11,500-year-old skull -- the oldest in the new world -- may help to
rewrite the theory of how the Americas were settled. A scientist studying
Luzia, as the fossil is called, says his findings don't fit the old idea
that the firstAmericans crossed the Bering land bridge in a single massive
migration between 11,000 and 10,000 years ago. Researchers on separate
projects have been coming to similar conclusions. Luzia apparently came
from the South Pacific. That, according to University of Sao Paulo anthropologist
Walter Neves, means Northeast Asians weren't the only settlers or even
the first. "This is the first known American," Neves said in a recent telephone
interview. "We were always told that the Americas were settled by
a Mongoloid people, but this shows that an older population came before
them." Researchers found the skull and other bones near Belo Horizonte,
about 200 miles north of Rio and determined that it probably belonged to
a woman age 20 to 25. Scientists dubbed her Luzia, the Portuguese name
for Lucy, the oldest known human unearthed in Africa in the 1970s. The
skull and artifacts from what seemed to be a campsite were brought to the
National Museum in Rio. Consistent results in carbon-dating tests carried
out in France and Brazil have Neves convinced that the chance of error
in dating the skull is "very slim." In 1995, Neves began tests to compare
Luzia with modern humans. He found that Luzia's skull and teeth had characteristics
similar to people of the South Pacific. That strengthened his belief that
Pacific tribes reached the Americas before the Mongoloids, who arrived
8,000 to 9,000 years ago. A growing body of evidence supports the idea
that migration occurred earlier and more often than scientists had thought.
Neves believes there were four distinct waves of migration, though he won't
hazard a guess at when the first settlers arrived. Tom Dillehay, a University
of Kentucky researcher who excavated at the Monte Verde archaeological
site in southern Chile, dated to 12,500 years ago, has said there is evidence
that people may have lived in Chile as early as 33,000 years ago. Neves'
theories jibe with the findings of U.S. anthropologists Joseph Powell and
Erik Ozolins of the University of New Mexico, who tested about three dozen
samples from North and South America. Since 1992, Powell has studied skulls
and teeth of human fossils found in North America. He agrees that the first
settlers probably were not from north-central Asia. "There has been mounting
evidence since the late 1980s that non-Mongoloid people were among the
first Americans," Powell said in a telephone interview from Albuquerque,
N.M. Neves and Powell presented their findings at last month's annual meeting
of the Association of American Physical Anthropologists Among them: The
first South Americans resemble South Pacific and African populations, while
the first North Americans seem to be a mixture of South
Pacific and European peoples.