ИСТИНА

The diversity of the population of Latin America has been studied for a long time and by various methods, including craniometric methods. However, due to the specifics of the material, there is a number of difficulties that have to be taken into account and overcome. This are, first of all, the prevalence of the tradition of artificial cranial deformation in this area, which immediately excludes a large amount of craniometric data. Secondly, a poor documentation of the existing collections. They were mainly collected at the beginning of the 20th century, when, apparently, the methods of collecting material were not sufficiently developed to obtain the information needed in population studies. For this work, literature data on craniometric series from the territory of Latin America, North America, and North, Central, East and Southeast Asia were collected in order to study the morphological diversity of populations of the Asian-American branch of humanity. More than 80 craniological series from the listed territories were included in the study. Only average data on a small set of craniometric features were involved in the analysis. The mathematical analysis included several stages. Comparison of the studied series for individual features and for a set of features, using canonical discriminant analysis and decision trees. As a result of the comparison, a strong isolation of groups from the territory of Patagonia was noted, including their strong difference from the Fuegians. Botokuda and Lagoa Santa from the territory of Brazil are most similar to the groups from the territory of Peru and Mexico, which are also close in craniometric data to each other. From the territory of Asia, the Chukchi and Eskimo groups are closest to the American populations. Preliminarily, we can conclude that the studied populations of Latin America have a high heterogeneity. One of the reasons may be the specificity of the material, and the other is the strong variability of the population on the continent. The second hypothesis is supported by the increased morphological diversity of the modern indigenous population.