Menéndez Lumila Paula, Urban Matthias
Department Anthropology of the Americas, University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany.
School of Anthropology, University of Costa Rica, San José, Costa Rica.
Am J Biol Anthropol. 2025 Jul;187(3):e70077. doi: 10.1002/ajpa.70077.
Studying the relationship between biological and cultural diversity can lead to rich insights into human history. South America has been relatively neglected in this kind of work, even though it intriguingly exhibits unexpectedly high biological and cultural diversity. Here, we focus on a particularly understudied part of the continent, the Southern Cone, and examine linguistic, craniometric, and genetic variation across five groups: Selk'nam, Qawaskar, Mapuche, Kunza, and Qom.
We retrieved craniometric and genetic data from public databases and coded linguistic data capturing variation in sound systems and grammatical structures specifically for this study. We calculated distance matrices (Mahalanobis, Jaccard, F) and compared them using partial Mantel, Procrustes analysis, and multidimensional scaling in R.
Selk'nam and Qawaskar exhibit the strongest linguistic and craniometric similarities, likely due to geographic proximity, while Mapuche and Qom are the most genetically similar, reflecting recent migrations. Consistent with global studies, we observed a statistically significant correlation between the relatively plastic cranial vault morphology and the quickly evolving linguistic variables. Genetic variability was moderately related to geography, while the weakest correlation was found between the temporal bone morphology and genetic variation.
Although this study is limited by a small sample size and requires further research validation with larger datasets, our findings highlight the importance of integrating multiple datasets to better understand the interplay between biological and cultural diversity in shaping human history. Our findings also indicate that structural linguistic data help reconstruct population history, particularly at recent and intermediate scales.
研究生物多样性与文化多样性之间的关系能够为人类历史带来丰富的见解。南美洲在这类研究中相对被忽视了，尽管它令人感兴趣地展现出了出乎意料的高生物多样性和文化多样性。在此，我们聚焦于该大陆一个特别未被充分研究的部分——南锥体地区，并考察塞尔克南人、卡瓦斯卡尔人、马普切人、昆扎人和科姆人这五个群体的语言、颅骨测量学和基因变异情况。
我们从公共数据库中检索了颅骨测量学和基因数据，并专门为这项研究对捕捉语音系统和语法结构变异的语言数据进行了编码。我们计算了距离矩阵（马氏距离、杰卡德距离、F距离），并在R语言中使用偏曼特尔检验、普罗克汝斯忒斯分析和多维尺度分析对它们进行比较。
塞尔克南人和卡瓦斯卡尔人表现出最强的语言和颅骨测量学相似性，这可能是由于地理位置接近，而马普切人和科姆人在基因上最为相似，这反映了近期的迁徙情况。与全球研究一致，我们观察到相对可塑性较强的颅顶形态与快速演变的语言变量之间存在统计学上的显著相关性。基因变异性与地理因素有一定程度的关联，而颞骨形态与基因变异之间的相关性最弱。
尽管本研究受样本量较小的限制，需要用更大的数据集进行进一步的研究验证，但我们的发现凸显了整合多个数据集以更好地理解生物多样性和文化多样性在塑造人类历史过程中相互作用的重要性。我们的发现还表明，结构化语言数据有助于重建人口历史，特别是在近期和中期尺度上。
