First Americans: Australoids

I've had the opportunity to watch a fascinating BBC documentary on the first Americans, called Paleo-Indians, a few months ago. It is based on research conducted in Brazil (Pedra Furada, the now famous Luzia skull, and other such sites in the area).

The researchers cited in this program argued that the first Americans were not of Mongoloid origin, but were in fact Australoids...

That would seem to be a very bold assertion, but in fact their arguments are quite convincing...

Here is the link:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/430944.stm

-"Images of giant armadillos, which died out before the last ice age, show the artists who drew them lived before even the natives who greeted the Europeans."

-"The skull dimensions and facial features match most closely the native people of Australia and Melanesia. Those people date back to about 60, 000 years ago, and were themselves descended from the first humans, who left Africa about 100, 000 years ago.

But how would the early Australians have travelled more than 13, 500 kilometers (8, 500 miles) at that time? The answer comes from more cave paintings, this time from the Kimberley, a region at the northern tip of Western Australia.

Here Grahame Walsh, an expert on Australian rock art, found the oldest painting of a boat anywhere in the world. The style of the art means it is at least 17, 000 years old, and it could be up to 50, 000 years old.

And the crucial detail is the high prow of the boat. This would have been unnecessary for boats used in calm, inland waters. The design suggests it was used on the open ocean.

Archaeologists speculate that such an incredible sea voyage, from Australia to Brazil, would not have been undertaken knowingly but by accident.

Just three years ago, five African fishermen were caught in a storm and a few weeks later were washed up on the shores of South America. Two of the fishermen died, but three made it alive. The shape of the skulls changes between 9,000 and 7, 000 years ago from being exclusively negroid to exclusively mongoloid. Combined with rock art and evidence of increasing violence at this time, it appears that the mongoloid people from the north invaded and wiped out the original Americans.

The only evidence of any survivors comes from Terra del Fuego, the islands at the remotest tip of South America.

The pre-European Fuegeans who lived Stone Age style lives until this century, show hybrid skull features which could have resulted from intermarrying between mongoloid and negroid peoples. Their rituals and traditions also bear resemblance to the ancient rock art in Brazil."

I wonder what would have happened if these Paleo-Indians had not been wiped out by the ancestors of modern Native-Americans...
 
Why do we have to assume they were wiped out? Wouldn't it be more logical to assume that they're part of the background of Native American groups?
 
Why do we have to assume they were wiped out? Wouldn't it be more logical to assume that they're part of the background of Native American groups?

I believe they are. According to haplogroup genetics, about 10 % of Native American Y-chromosomes belong to haplogroup C, which is common in Australian Aborigines.

The problem is that others argue that this haplogroup is present in modern Native Americans, because you can also find it in Northern Eurasia (it is also found at high levels in Mongolia...), that is not only in Australia.

Genetic analysis is being conducted on those remains, so we will eventually find out.
 
There is also traces of European and African haplogroups IIRC. It seems the New World was settled from all directions, but the vast majority came from the Bering land bridge.
 
Sailing from Austalia to Brazil?

Why not Australia to Chile?


It was Australia to Chile. The Australian settlers were able to explore all of South America before the more populous settlers from Siberia were able to assimilate them.
 
There is also traces of European and African haplogroups IIRC. It seems the New World was settled from all directions, but the vast majority came from the Bering land bridge.

Actually, there are no African haplogroups per se (if there are, this is due to recent admixture). Australoids, though, were part of the first coastal migration out of Africa. Genetic traces of that migration are found in southern India for instance, with a small amount of C haplotypes.

The second migration included all other haplogroups after D, if I am not mistaken. The E haplogroup (most frequent among Bantus), was in fact part of the second migration, which included all other haplogroups. It is in fact speculated that the E haplogroup first went to the Middle East, and then moved backwards to Africa.

About European DNA, there is the controversy around the presence of the X2 MtDNA haplogroup found in Native Americans. This Mitochondrial DNA haplogroup (women) is found in only 2 % of European women, but it is not found in Siberia, which is unexpected. This has led some researchers to establish a link between European populations and Native American populations. Some even argued that Europeans could have travelled across the frozen Atlantic (hunting for seals, then getting lost) and reached America before Siberians.

I do not think this is a reasonable hypothesis. I saw a documentary on TV about this, with a very good looking brunette with striking grey eyes playing the role of the "X haplotype European cave woman", which was in itself entertaining, plus beautiful CGI icy landscapes, but I think scientific evidence is too scarce to accept that explanation.

In order to follow that discussion better, those of you who are interested in this subject might want to look at the genographic project's atlas of human migrations.

Here is the most important link:

https://www3.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/atlas.html

Click on 10, 000 B.C..When you see the arrows, click on them. Y-DNA haplogroups are male lines, MtDNA haplogroups are female lines.
X is easy to find: it is one of the beige arrows in northern America.

About Y-DNA haplogroup C:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_C_(Y-DNA)

About MtDNA haplogroup X:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_X_(mtDNA)

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1180497

The last one is for specialists.

About Kennewick man:

http://www.nps.gov/archeology/kennewick/kaestle.htm
 
Last edited:
I've had the opportunity to watch a fascinating BBC documentary on the first Americans, called Paleo-Indians, a few months ago. It is based on research conducted in Brazil (Pedra Furada, the now famous Luzia skull, and other such sites in the area).

The researchers cited in this program argued that the first Americans were not of Mongoloid origin, but were in fact Australoids...

That would seem to be a very bold assertion, but in fact their arguments are quite convincing...

Here is the link:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/430944.stm

-"Images of giant armadillos, which died out before the last ice age, show the artists who drew them lived before even the natives who greeted the Europeans."

-"The skull dimensions and facial features match most closely the native people of Australia and Melanesia. Those people date back to about 60, 000 years ago, and were themselves descended from the first humans, who left Africa about 100, 000 years ago.

But how would the early Australians have travelled more than 13, 500 kilometers (8, 500 miles) at that time? The answer comes from more cave paintings, this time from the Kimberley, a region at the northern tip of Western Australia.

Here Grahame Walsh, an expert on Australian rock art, found the oldest painting of a boat anywhere in the world. The style of the art means it is at least 17, 000 years old, and it could be up to 50, 000 years old.

And the crucial detail is the high prow of the boat. This would have been unnecessary for boats used in calm, inland waters. The design suggests it was used on the open ocean.

Archaeologists speculate that such an incredible sea voyage, from Australia to Brazil, would not have been undertaken knowingly but by accident.

Just three years ago, five African fishermen were caught in a storm and a few weeks later were washed up on the shores of South America. Two of the fishermen died, but three made it alive. The shape of the skulls changes between 9,000 and 7, 000 years ago from being exclusively negroid to exclusively mongoloid. Combined with rock art and evidence of increasing violence at this time, it appears that the mongoloid people from the north invaded and wiped out the original Americans.

The only evidence of any survivors comes from Terra del Fuego, the islands at the remotest tip of South America.

The pre-European Fuegeans who lived Stone Age style lives until this century, show hybrid skull features which could have resulted from intermarrying between mongoloid and negroid peoples. Their rituals and traditions also bear resemblance to the ancient rock art in Brazil."

I wonder what would have happened if these Paleo-Indians had not been wiped out by the ancestors of modern Native-Americans...

I think I saw the same documentary on History channel a long while ago. Thanks for bringing it up. I wanted to post a WI like this "WI the Australoids hadn't been wiped out?". but, since I wasn't sure how solid the evidence behind this documentary was, I didn't.

I mean, the documentary was very well done, but the deptiction of Australoids as an idilic society and the Mongoloids as a violent people (almost genocidal) seems a bit far-fetched, specially if it isn't confirmed by any other evidence. As far as I know, even the presence of Australoids is still just a theory.

In any case, it would be intresting to assume that the premises of the documentary are true (Australoids colonized South America before been wiped out by Mongoloids), and ask ourselves what would have happened if the Mongoloids hadn't come to South America (or North america if you want to, also).

I think that the Americas would have been very different. Advanced civilizations might have appeared (the natural resources for them to arise where there), and if they did they would probably have been very different from the ones that appeared IOTL. How different??? Well, we might get a hint by studyng the culture of Australoids. But even if we did, trying to deduce how these civilization would look like is as hard as it would be for somebody who knows absolutely nothing about the New World indigenous cultures to try to picture the Incas by studing the peoples of OTL Siberia.

But, in any case, given that the American continent had natural limitatitions that the Old World didn't have (no animals apt for domestication except llamas; NORTH-WEST Axis instead of an EAST-WEST one, etc.), I think that we would still see the Old World colonizing the New World in this TL.
 
I mean, the documentary was very well done, but the deptiction of Australoids as an idilic society and the Mongoloids as a violent people (almost genocidal) seems a bit far-fetched, specially if it isn't confirmed by any other evidence. As far as I know, even the presence of Australoids is still just a theory.

About the idyllic society/ genocidal bastards, I agree with you to some extent. However, the culture developed by Australoids in southern America did seem to have been quite pacific, or at least that is the image the Australoids had of themselves.

Rock art depicts a man kissing a woman on her cheek, for instance, which is quite cute, and surprising for that period. I do not know if you can find that kind of representations in Europe, for instance. That would be a hint, among others, for the future development of an 'Australoid' civilization.

There has been genocides during history (India, England, perhaps even Europe as a whole...), but as this is very early in time, I understand your qualms about the whole issue.

Diseases might have played a part in the Australoids' demise. The Australoids were part of the first human migration out of Africa, and because of this, they had not shared much of the rest of human history (or prehistory, rather) with other populations, who were part of the second great migration (most modern day Africans, Europeans, Asians, Native Americans, Middle-Easterners...).

There is also a dramatic event in northern American history (a comet or something), but I do not know when it happened. I will post a link next time.

One must not discard Australoids' presence in northern America. The Indians of the North-western coast (Washington, Canada) have a fairly higher percentage of C haplotypes, I believe. There is also a Spanish account of a 'black' population living in isolation in the Western coast of Mexico (you know, at the tip of a kind of long peninsula whose name I cannot remember).
 
Last edited:

Nikephoros

Banned
The show I saw on the History Channel(I think) had Europeans come across the ocean. They brought their stone tool technology, but got killed off/assimilated by Mongoloids.

I question that show's science though.
 
The most interesting thing about Australoids is that they were beachcombers and seafarers, contrary to the ancestors of most Native Americans, who came from Siberia and were experienced hunters, adapted to Ice Age conditions.

The Australoids were less warlike because of this, which might have been a problem when they encountered the Clovis people who mastered hunting techniques, that is killing techniques.

Actually, the Australoids were much more advanced than other populations in terms of seafaring. I wonder what could be the effects of such technological superiority in the early development of a new civilization.

I would also like to point out that the Indians of the American north-west and Canadian south-west seem to have better seafaring techniques than other Indians, and they are the Indians with a major component of C haplotypes (close to Australian Aborigines...).

Any ideas?
 
The researchers are French, which does not help when you want to get your theory accepted in an American and Brazilian context largely dominated by a whole army of 'Clovis-first' scholars. In Europe, though, the theory met with some degree of approval, hence the BBC show.

To make matters worse, the researcher who first propounded that theory is a woman...

She was the first to decide to do research in that region, which was previously shunned by other archeologists and paleoanthropologists.

Here is the point of view of 'Australoids-first' researchers:

http://www.andaman.org/BOOK/chapter54/text-PedraFurada/text-PedraFurada.htm

http://www.andaman.org/BOOK/reprints/guidon/guidon_chronology.htm

The second paper is called 'The Chronology of the New World:two faces of one reality', by N.Guidon and B.Arnaud.
 
The show I saw on the History Channel(I think) had Europeans come across the ocean. They brought their stone tool technology, but got killed off/assimilated by Mongoloids.

I question that show's science though.

Didn't everyone have stone tools by the time the Americas were being populated?
 
An interesting article from the New Scientist indicates that the Australoids might have followed the coastal route even further, and instead of hopping from Australia to South America by accident, might have discovered America 'willingly' by following the shores of Northern Asia.

This would explain the presence of Australian Aboriginal Y-chromosomes not only in Native American populations, but also in Mongolia.

http://www.newscientist.com/article...y-push-the-date-back-bythousands-of-years.htm
 
Didn't everyone have stone tools by the time the Americas were being populated?

The reasoning behind the idea that ice-age europeans crossed the Atlantic (see the Solutrean Hypothesis) is that the stone tools of the solutrean culture are closer in style to the Clovis point that that of those who lived in Siberia.

Of course, the validity of the theory remains to be seen.
 
The reasoning behind the idea that ice-age europeans crossed the Atlantic (see the Solutrean Hypothesis) is that the stone tools of the solutrean culture are closer in style to the Clovis point that that of those who lived in Siberia.

Of course, the validity of the theory remains to be seen.

My own view about the analogy between Native American and European stone tools is based on genetics.

On the 'family tree' of mankind, the Native American and European Y-chromosomes are quite close ('Q' and 'R'). It means that at some point in time, European males and Native American males originated from a single population in Central Asia. Those who migrated eastward became Native Americans, and those who migrated westward became Europeans.

For more information, look at the genographic project atlas of human migrations (you can find the link in this thread).

Native American and European female lines (MTDna) are quite different, though, but stone tool techniques were probably passed on by males.
 
Top