A comparative approach to the relationships of European and non-European late Pleistocene and early Holocene populations

In this paper the relationship of the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene populations of NW-Africa, the Near East and Europe is discussed. The uni- and bivariate-statistics and the discriminant analytical approaches yield only slight doubts as to the autochthonous status of the North-African populations. Because the Protomagnoids show much higher affinities to the African than does the European sample this may be an indication of common ancestry of these groups (whether in Africa or in Western Asia remains uncertain). The exclusive orientation of the Natufians to the European sample by bivariate and discriminant function analysis has been interpreted as representing convergent adaptations in a similar socio-economic environment. There are weak or even unreasonable arguments to postulate a direct relationship of the Near East populations and the Western Europeans because the geographically closer Eastern Europeans differ much more from the Natufians than the Western Europeans (for a detailed analysis of the individual affinities see Henke, 1989). The results from the principal component analysis offer no conclusive support for the above described view, but they are not in contradiction with the given interpretation either. These results seem to show less divergence between the European and non-European sample, but a detailed analysis of the regional and temporal samples, which is given in Henke (1989), allows an alignment of the interpretations of the multivariate statistics (discriminant analysis and principal component analysis).