Dentition of Chilean paleo-Indians and peopling of the Americas.

ABSTRACT

Teeth of 12 cremated paleo-Indians (11,000 years old) from caves in southern Chile have crown and root morphology like that of recent American Indians and north Asians, but unlike that of Europeans. This finding supports the view that American Indians originated in northeast Asia. This dental series also suggests that paleo-Indians could easily have been ancestral to most living Indians, that very little dental evolution has occurred, and that the founding paleo-Indian population was small, genetically homogeneous, and arrived late in the Pleistocene.