Ancient humans brought bottle gourds to the Americas from Asia
Plants widely used as containers arrived, already domesticated, some 10,000 years ago
Thick-skinned bottle gourds widely used as containers by prehistoric peoples were likely brought to the Americas some 10,000 years ago by individuals who arrived from Asia, according to a new genetic comparison of modern bottle gourds with gourds found at archaeological sites in the Western Hemisphere. The finding solves a longstanding archaeological enigma by explaining how a domesticated variant of a species native to Africa ended up millennia ago in places as far removed as modern-day Florida, Kentucky, Mexico and Peru.
The work, by a team of anthropologists and biologists from Harvard University, the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History, Massey University in New Zealand and the University of Maine, appears this week on the web site of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Integrating genetics and archaeology, the researchers assembled a collection of ancient remnants of bottle gourds from across the Americas. They then identified key genetic markers from the DNA of both the ancient gourds and their modern counterparts in Asia and Africa before comparing the plants' genetic make-up to determine the origins of the New World gourds. "
(This story has appeared before - but this is a more coherent account)

 

Skulls shed new light on migration to Americas
Cranial shapes hint at two separate waves of settlers, scientists say
For decades it has been believed that the first peoples to populate North and South America crossed over from Siberia by way of the Bering Strait on a land-ice bridge.
However, a new study examining the largest collection of South American skulls ever assembled suggests that a different population may have crossed the bridge to the New World 3,000 years before those Siberians.
Scientists occasionally discover skulls in South America that look more like those belonging to indigenous Australians and Melanesians than Northern Asians, but researchers tend to regard these skulls as anomalies due to natural variation rather than a norm, mainly because there were too few to study.

 

Desecration of Iwi sites in Wellington angers local tribes.
Archaeological evidence of local Iwi dwellings in the heart of the wellington CBD about to be destroyed by insensitive pakeha developers.
On the corner of Taranaki and Manners street In Wellington, a large ancient Pa with three or more ancient dwellings dating probably to the 6Th and 7Th century or even later, were unearthed recently by developers on a half acre piece of real estate said local Iwi scientist Karena Puhi. This half acre site would provide for local Iwi a clear picture of the lives Iwi lived in the environs of the Te Whanga Nui A Tara area, one of its original names in pre-pakeha days. The developers are today or very soon going to cover this site with a high rise apartment block, which would destroy any hope of Iwi carrying out an extensive archaeological examination of the site for the next 100 to 200 years. We could find out who was there, what the area was used for, by whom, when and for how long also who was there before the Kupe. "