I place all post hoc explanations of human biological variation such as population replacement by phenotypically different peoples, and colonization into the category of “typological assessments.” However, they can also be called model-free methods (Relethford and Lees, 1982), because they have no underlying hypotheses to test. Typological approaches to prehistoric human variation do not attempt to understand the dynamic processes underlying the observed phenotypic differences (or similarities) in populations, except as the product of historical events, that is, population migration/colonization (Neves et al., 1999b; Steele and Powell, 1992, 1993, 2002). The works of Blumenbach (1795), and Cuvier (1812) are by definition pre-evolutionary and thus racial–typological.

MIGRATION, COLONIZATION, AND THE FIRST AMERICANS

Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century researchers (Gladwin, 1947; Hooton, 1930; Morton, 1839; Neumann, 1952; Rivet, 1943; Oetteking, 1934) and some recent authors continue to place the First Americans within a racial–typological framework, although some migration/racial–typological models have components that appear evolutionary (Chatters, 1998; Chatters et al., 1999; Greenberg et al., 1986; Neumann, 1952; Neves and Pucciarelli, 1989; Neves et al., 1996a, 1999a, 1999b, 2003; Steele and Powell, 1992, 1993; Turner, 1985a, 1990). These suggest some minimal role for microevolutionary processes, such as natural selection, genetic drift, and gene flow.