- Project title
- Human morphological diversification in the Argentinean Pampas: Implications for the Peopling of South America
- Description of the project
- This project aims to study the evolutionary diversification of humans in South America. For doing that I will focus on studying the morphological variation of the inner ear’s bony labyrinth for discussing the current hypothesis on the peopling of the Americas, i.e., 1- ancestral population coming from East Asia; 2- ancestral population located in South East Asia. If the latter happens to be the case, then we would expect to find morphological affinities between South Americans and individuals from Oceania. On the contrary, if the ancestral population originated in East Asia, then we would expect to find the closest affinities between South Americans and East Asians. The bony labyrinth, which is the bony outer wall of the inner ear in the temporal bone, is subject to little or no developmental plasticity and thus has been described as preserving a strong phylogenetic signal, being a good proxy for reconstructing population history (Ponce de León et al., 2018). Therefore, is a very relevant and promising structure for discussing population history in South America.
Works done by the platform AST-RX
