The Treasured Contribution of the Inner Ear to the Study of the Morphological Variation among Ancient Individuals from Brazil

Summary

This is an abstract from the "“The South Also Exists”: The Current State of Prehistoric Archaeology in Brazil: Dialogues across Different Theoretical Approaches and Research Agendas" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Despite almost 200 years of debate, there are still crucial aspects that we do not fully understand in relation to the evolutionary history of South Americans. One of the major obstacles has been the limited number of available early Holocene skeletal samples with good preservation coming from the same region. In Brazil, there are two areas very rich in terms of the number of human burials from the early Holocene: Lagoa Santa (Minas Gerais) and Serra da Capivara (Piauí). Studies have been aiming at reconstructing the evolutionary history on two fronts: craniometric studies and aDNA analysis, but both have their limitations. In this presentation, we will share the preliminary results of the study of the morphological variation of a promising anatomical structure for reconstructing evolutionary history: the inner ear. We studied a sample of individuals spanning from the early to the late Holocene from different sites and localities in the Northeast and Central-East of Brazil (Serra da Capivara, Serra das Confusoes, Lagoa Santa, Pedra do Cachorro, Furna do Estrago; N~90). We will discuss the evolutionary implications of the biological affinities described here and propose an interdisciplinary framework for researchers working with human skeletons.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• “The South Also Exists”: The Current State of Prehistoric Archaeology in Brazil: Dialogues across Different Theoretical Approaches and Research Agendas   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 41525.0