Ancient Skulls from a California and Alabama Shell Mound May be of European Origin According to University Archaeologist
Photos show a series of "primitive" looking skulls associated with the Maritime Archaic. On the far left is the Penon woman who is one of the oldest skulls found in North America in 7000 BC. The middle skull is from a shell mound in Alabama whose skeletal remains were described as "large." To the right is a skull that was described as the "missing link," from Santa Barbara California. The long narrow skulls resemble those of Europeans more than those of the later Native American populations.
In an article by the "Independent" December 2, 2002
Does the Penon Women's skull prove that the first Americans came from Europe?"
"Scientists from Liverpool's John Moores University and Oxford's Research Laboratory of Archaeology have dated the skull to about 13,000 years old, making it 2,000 years older than the previous record for the continent's oldest human remains.
However, the most intriguing aspect of the skull is that it is long and narrow and typically Caucasian in appearance, like the heads of white, western Europeans today.
Modern-day native Americans, however, have short, wide skulls that are typical of their Mongoloid ancestors who are known to have crossed into America from Asia on an ice-age land bridge that had formed across the Bering Strait."
Silvia Gonzalez, a Mexican-born archaeologist working at John Moores University and the leader of the research team, accepted yesterday that her discovery lends weight to the highly contentious idea that the first Americans may have actually been Europeans.
"At the moment it points to that as being likely. They were definitely not Mongoloid in appearance. They were from somewhere else. As to whether they were European, at this point in time we cannot say 'no'," Dr. Gonzalez said."
