Colonization vs. demic expansion in the Azapa Valley, Chile: Reply to Rothhammer et al.
✍ Scribed by Richard C. Sutter
- Book ID
- 101462725
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2006
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 99 KB
- Volume
- 131
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0002-9483
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Recently, Sutter and Mertz (2004) presented the results of a nonmetric cranial trait variation analysis in the Azapa Valley, Chile, concluding ''that no significant prehistoric gene flow occurred in the Azapa Valley'' on the basis of insignificant distances between eight samples spanning a chronologic interval of over 5,000 years. However, contradicting the idea of microevolutionary stasis which, according to Sutter and Mertz (2004), could be the result of ''the data reduction techniques employed,'' a dendrogram generated using the nonsignificant distances as input revealed the existence of a ''degree of breeding isolation between prehistoric coastal and inland populations.'' The possibility of the observed effect having been caused by differential gene flow from the highlands into the Azapa Valley, as suggested by the great majority of professional archaeologists working in the area and by craniometric studies conducted by us, was overlooked by Sutter and Merz (2004).
Citing numerous publications of our research team supposedly aimed at assessing prehistoric genetic affinities in the Azapa Valley, Sutter and Mertz ( 2004) argued that we used ''different combinations of variables, different statistical procedures, and different mortuary samples'' for studying craniometric variation. Of more than 11 publications cited, only three were directly concerned with the Azapa Valley. The other papers explored different bioanthropological questions such as migrational patterns along the Peruvian coast, the peo-