Palaeo-Negrids belonged to the earliest pre-Columbian colonists and in the Mesolithic they began to import remains of the Oldowan pebble-stone chopping-tool traditions from the Hmong-Mien tribes in China. A conspicuous feature was that their women were dressed like Melanesian females. They went out barebreasted with naked breasts and wore only fringed grass aprons similar to those common among Amazonian rainforest tribes. Among Californian tribes such clothing-style fashion can be perceived among the Cocopa/Cucapá tribes, Baja California Sur in Mexico and Maruranau in Guyana. Their original unity is probably grasped by the Cochimí-Yuma language family. Around 1500 the Spanish missionary Father Bartolomé de la Casas described their typical clothing style in his book A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies as follows: “The Indian women of Cuba, as once did women of many places, went naked. Married women wore a small skirt or apron, called an enagua, which did not cover their breasts and rarely reached the knee. These women in the marriage ceremony, took to the marriage chamber all the friends of the husband, and later emerged to the cry Manikato, the cry of victory.” He observed such habits as a mark of sexual depravity.

Pampids. The standard accounts of language families classify the Quechua, Aymara, Puelche, Tehuelche, Yaghan and Akalakuf as subgroups of the Andean-Equatorial or Pueblo-Andean complex. This means that linguists and anthropologist do not distinguish two fraternal stocks of Ugrids and Uralids. They treat them as one united family although the Ugrids speak k-languages with k-plurals and exhibit the paternal haplotype Q, whereas the Uralids speak t-languages with t-plurals and display the paternal haplogroup N. They do not realise that the Tehuelche form an alternative Uraloid group of Pampids. Tehuelche people lived on raising and breeding llamas in the pampa grasslands of Argentine. They share several common traits with Andids such as pastoralism, brachycephaly exceeding the index of 83, tall statures spanning from 168 to 177 and leptorhiny between 67.0 and 71.9. However, they differ from Andids by living in the marquee tents called toldo. Their architectonic principles were reminiscent of mobile portable constructions of the Bedouins, Arabian camel-breeders and Tibetans. Where Andids continued the beehive tradition of cupolar cairns and tholoi, Tehuelche preferred marquee tents of irregular quadrangular shape. It hung on several projecting poles that supported the top in several elevated peaks. Moreover, they wore Siberian and Asiatic head-bands and broad-rimmed hats typical of Uralians, Sarmatians, Mongolians and Tibetans. Their close cognates are traceable also in the north of Latin America, although these relatives were contaminated by tribal practices of marital exogamy and now combine cattle-breeding with cultivating maize. Most of them belong to the Mura–Matanawi language family. Their arrival became visible by the spread of archaeological cultures with stemmed projectile points of Uruguay tradition. “By about 11,000 BP, however, two lithic traditions were widespread. The Uruguay tradition, characterized by bifacial stemmed projectile points, was associated with open vegetation in the south; the Itaparica tradition, emphasizing well-formed unifacial artifacts, had dispersed over the eastern tropical parklands.”1

Amero-Uralids. The only reasonable conclusion is that the advent of Pampids and Techuelche llama-herders to South America must be associated with the diffusion of Siberian stemmed points. They served as bifacial projectiles with a stem inserted into the wooden spear haft. These spearheads had sharpened edges and a sharp pointed tip. Archaeologists attribute their production to the Brazilian Uruguayan tradition famous for producing stemmed projectile points from stone flakes. They could be used also as knives, scrapers or picks. The alternative Itaparica tradition stemmed from different roots, it had to do with the lineage of Europoid Litteralids repressed by Lagids.

Lagids. The variety of Lagids or Lagoa Santa types is found along the eastern Atlantic coasts of South America. According to their subsistence centred on shellfish and sites spread along shallow seashore regions they may be classified as Littoralids. They lived as nomadic beachcombers who erected rectangular abodes, kept roving along seaside coastlines and gathered the drift of seafood washed ashore. Their temporary settlements are usually visible thanks to dumps of shell midden around their seats. Brazilian archaeology recognises them as sambaquis, large heaps of molluscs on sand dunes. They seem to have arrived about 6000 BC and settled down both along the Atlantic and the Pacific shores. In British Columbia they appeared two millennia earlier, their Canadian site Namu comes from the period 10,000 years ago. Other North American sites are located at Channel Islands, California, and the Otter Mound in the Everglades region of Florida. Their Brazilian descendants are included into the Macro-Gê languages family. It encompasses Guató, Bororo, Purían, Otuke, Jodi, Krenák and Kadiuweu languages. Their industry is characterized by large bifacial implements and rough macrolithic cores used as hammocks. Southern coastal finds were excavated at Bahía Agustín and Caleta Vitor in northern Chile and at Lanashuaia in Tierra del Fuego, Argentina. Most American sites are classified as either the Sambaqui tradition or the Humaitá tradition.1

American sites show numerous parallels to Eurasian Littoralids with the archaic Y-haplogroup IJK (47,000 BP). Since the Y-haplotype I belongs to Europids, J to oriental Elamitoids and K to the Lapita culture in Oceania, its appearance agrees with the general phenotype of Amerindian Pre-Europids. One of its possible roots may have arisen from the European Campignians (10,000 BC). Yet its primordial position is beaten by the earlier Japanese Jomon culture (16,000 BP). The Lagids show mesoskelic or sometimes brachyskelic constitution and they have hypsicephalic and dolichocephalic or mesocephalic crania. Their nose is mesorrhine, low-rooted, straight or concave. Their face is large and low. It manifests deep-set eyes and supraorbital ridges. The jaw and cheekbones are broad.

Map 19. Renato Biasutti’s distribution of Amerindian phenotypes

Race	Ethnic Group	Architecture
Eskimo Inuits	Icelandic Thule culture, 200 BC	domed whalebone houses
Eskimo Miute	Eskimo Miute tribes	domed beehives, horizontal entrance corridors
Eskimo-Scythoids	Dorset culture, 500 BC	domed snow igloo shelters
Amero-Ugrids	Algonquian buffalo-hunters	domed wigwams
Amero-Ugrids	Californian Acjachemen, Chiricahua	dome-shaped wigwam, wickiup or wetu
Latino-Ugrids Latino-Scythoids	Quechua and Inka mummification rites	pyramids and megalith-buildings built in mountainous highlands
Amero-Uralids Amero-Sarmatids	Assiniboines, Sarcee, Serrano, big-game hunters and herders	marquee tents and four-pitch-roof huts projectiles with stemmed points
Latino-Uralids Latino-Sarmatids	Tehuelche llama breeders with stemmed points	marquee tents and four-pitch-roof houses built in highland pastures
Eskimo-Turanids Eskimo-Turcoids	Yukon Kutchin-Han-Kaska Turcoids with R*-M173	rock shelters and rectangular earth covered houses, 13,000 BP
Amero-Turanids	Seminole with circumcision	wall-less stilt-houses (chickees)
Amero-Turanids	Puebloan upper castes	cliff-dwellings developed from rock-shelters
Amero-Tungids	Cree, nomadic fishermen	crude conical tepees
Amero-Tungids	Miwok-Maidu family	crude plank tepees out of cedar bark
Amero-Tungids	Uto-Aztecans, flower cult	conical tepee tent, lake-dwelling, acorn mush
Amero-Tungids	Caribbean pirates and fishers	cylindrical huts and pointed conical roofs
Amero-Lappids	Athapaskan Lappids, 200 AD	double lean-tos
Athapaskan Lappids	Californian Hupa, 200 AD?	semidugout pithouses, steamhouses, saunas
Latino-Negritids Latino-Pygmids	Arawak tribes, 9500 BC blowgun, poisoned arrows	one-slope lean-tos Carribean conical roundhouses
Latino-Negrids	Tupí and Guaraní tribes	rectangular longhouses called malocas
Palaeo-Negrids	Cocopa-Ngabere, Central America	with hip-roof rectangular houses
Amero-Elamitoids	Puebloans	multiroomed houses with flat roofs
Latino-Elamitoids Latino-Caucasoids	Mayas and Yucatan tribes languages with b-plurals	multi-cellular clay houses with flat-roofs access from ladders houses, no windows
Latino-Elamitoids	Otomi tribes	with flat-roof houses
Amero-Littorids	Haida fishermen, beachcombers	rectangular plank huts
Amero-Littoralids	Pacifids, littorids and fishermen	rectangular plank huts
Amero-Europids	Iroquois-Catawban family Silvids	with rectangular barrel-roof longhouses and wattle-and-daub walling
Amero-Pre-Europids	Caddoan macro-family Atlantic Silvids	thatched gabled rectangular longhouses and wattle-and-daub walling
Amero-Europids	Appalachians, Appalacids	Gothic domed thatched houses

Table 15. Native tribes of North America classified by the architecture of dwellings

Map 23. The architectural typology of Amerindian races

One of the most reliable criteria in solving ethnic identity is seen in popular architecture and folk costume designs. They withstand fleeting ephemeral fashions and survive for many millennia. For anthropologists they offer only facultative cultural markers but their testimony is as convincing as anthropometric indices. This is why Table 15 attempts to confront races and ethnic groups with tribal dwellings. Additional evidence on types of human abodes and shelters is summed in their regional typology and distribution depicted in Map 23. Current methods of ethnology and anthropology base their foundations on the classification of language families acknowledged by the highly-respected authorities of comparative linguistics. Its taxonomic considerations are, however, mostly built on comparing cognates in the lexical substance retrieved in neighbouring tongues and dialects. A serious warning is uttered by authors who argue that a lot of lexical cognates arose as loan-words and reveal only short-range affinity. Better results of the mid-range scope are supplied by population genetics and its study of chromosomal genomes. Surprisingly enough, the most convincing guide in quest for long-range and long-term affinities looms in architectural ethnology and the design of folk vestment.

Extract from Pavel Bělíček: The Differential Analysis of the Wordwide Human Varieties, Prague 2018,

pp. 52-72.

1 Pedro Ignacio Schmitz: Prehistoric hunters and gatherers of Brazil. Journal of World Prehistory March 1987, Volume 1, Issue 1, pp 53–126.

1 Helaine Silverman, William Isbell: Handbook of South American Archaeology. New York, NY, Secausus, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, 2008.