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[article provided by LH. Thanks!]

 http://abcnews.go.com/sections/science/DailyNews/neanderthal000218.html

American Neanderthal?
Unearthed Native American Could Help Solve Mystery

WASHINGTON, Feb. 18 -The baffling 9,300-year-old Kennewick
Man, whose skeleton was unearthed in 1996 in Washington
state, looks so "European" because he had Neanderthal roots,
a scientist said today.

The National Park Service said earlier this month it would
allow a genetic analysis of the skeleton, which some Native
American groups claim as an ancestor and want buried.

It has intrigued researchers because the features seem to
suggest a more Caucasian than Asian origin. Others say he
looks like an Ainu - the aboriginal people of Japan who are
often said to be physically closer to Europeans than
Japanese.

Loring Brace, a specialist in bone measurements at the
University of Michigan, says he has a simple explanation for
this - both Kennewick Man and the Ainu, along with the
people of Europe, descended from Neanderthals.

"I have long maintained that Neanderthals are obviously the
ancestors of living Europeans," Brace told a news conference
held at the annual meeting of the American Association for
the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
 

A Controversial Theory

"To produce a modern European out of a Neanderthal, all you
have to do is reduce the robustness," Brace said. Scale down
the heavy teeth, jaws and brow of the Neanderthal and you
have a European, he said.

It is a controversial theory because most scientists believe
that Neanderthals were an evolutionary dead-end, people who
lived side-by-side with the Cro-Magnons who were the
earliest Homo sapiens but who did not interbreed with them.

But Loring said his measurements that compare the skulls of
people all over the world suggest a resemblance among
peoples living in Europe, along the coastlines of Asia and
into ancient North America.

He also found two distinct groups among the Native
Americans. "It is clear there are two major groups and they
are not closely related to each other at all," Brace said.

One group physically more resembles East Asians, especially
modern Chinese, while the second looks a lot like the Ainu.

"Some of the Plains Indians don't look Native American at
all," Brace said.

He thinks they may have come from the same lineage as
Kennewick Man did. Brace has not been allowed to examine the
Kennewick remains, but thinks any measurements he could make
would support his theories.
 

Studies May Back Up Theory

Some recent evidence tends to support Brace. In October an
international team of scientists tested Neanderthal bones
found in Croatia in the 1970s and found they may be just
28,000 years old, which means they would have lived
side-by-side with modern humans for several thousand years.

Erik Trinkaus, an anthropologist at Washington University in
St. Louis, led that study and another one that a few months
earlier suggested that the 24,500-year-old bones of a child
found in Portugal showed characteristics of both
Neanderthals and of modern humans.

Trinkaus said he believed this suggested humans and
Neanderthals interbred, but Brace said it just as easily
could have been an  "intermediate" form of human evolving
from Neanderthal into modern Homo sapiens sapiens.

Although just a few years ago everyone agreed no humans
lived in the New World until about 11,000 years ago, and
that everyone trekked together over the Bering Strait into
Alaska, more and more evidence suggests that people started
coming over in successive waves as long as 30,000 years ago.

David Meltzer, an anthropologist at Southern Methodist
University, noted that huge ice sheets would have blocked
any passage from the Bering Strait down through Canada until
11,500 years ago.

A settlement in Monte Verde, Chile has been dated to 12,500
years ago, which suggests people must have come either a
different way, or long before the ice sheets formed.

Theodore Schurr of the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical
research in San Antonio, Texas did genetic studies that
found four separate lineages in the Americas, and using a
"molecular clock" that tracks the rate of mutations in DNA,
dates some of them back as far as 25,000 or 30,000 years
ago.

Some seem to originate in southeastern Siberia, while one
seems to have links with a relatively rare lineage found in
a few modern Europeans.
 

A Common Root

Johanna Nichols of the University of California-Berkeley,
who compared the structures of Native American languages to
languages found elsewhere in the world, said some of the
similarities when dated using a kind of linguistic clock,
could date back to a common ancestral language 30,000 years
ago.

One thing is clear, Meltzer said - when people did reach
what is now the continental United States they spread fast,
which meant they had to be astonishingly resourceful.

"In the space of 500 years they completely covered the
continent," he said. "These folk had no neighbors."

And most modern hunter-gatherers depend heavily on their
neighbors for information about the landscape.

The early colonists of the Americas had no one to ask where
to find water, food or herbs to cure their ills. And they
had few sources of fresh genes. "You can only marry your
sister so many times," Meltzer said.
 

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