Towards a reconciling model about the initial peopling of America

Stéphane Mazières (1)

1 UAABC - Anthropologie Bio-Culturelle

The last two decades have seen numerous debates in the field of the initial settlement of America and noteworthy was the disagreement between physical and molecular anthropologists. Recently, it has been pointed out that this discordance could partly originate from the description methods and classification labels used in craniometry, which did not account fairly for the within-sample and within-group variance. From there, a federative model for the initial peopling of America has been designed which could now explain the biological variability found at both the craniofacial and genetic level. This is a major step in the study of the initial settlement of America, which deserved to be highlighted. The present paper recalls the two conflicting models that prevailed for the last 20 years of anthropological studies in America before browsing the newly accepted hypothesis about the origin of the first Amerindians as seen by its authors. Lastly, the article evokes some areas of investigations, which could furnish significant fallouts about the dynamics of the peopling of Americas in the future

Mots clés: Amerindian biological variability; Discordance; Re-assessment; Beringia; Peopling models

Domaines: Anthropologie biologique

Stéphane Mazières. Towards a reconciling model about the initial peopling of America. Comptes Rendus Biologies, 2011, pp.1-8. ⟨10.1016/j.crvi.2011.03.007⟩. ⟨halshs-00591639⟩