The most commonly used approach in studies of ancient Americans is a multivariate statistical analysis that places each skull within a mathematical space defined by multiple measurements simultaneously, and then identifies which other populations’ skulls occupy the nearest position in that mathematical space.

When this kind of analysis is applied to the Lagoa Santa skulls, the result is consistently that the Lagoa Santa skulls are more similar, in this multivariate morphological space, to skulls from sub-Saharan Africa, Australia, and Melanesia than to skulls from East Asia or from later Native American populations.

This finding has been replicated by multiple research teams using different skull samples and different measurement protocols, which gives it reasonable robustness as a morphological finding.

The controversy is not about whether the morphological finding is real — it is — but about what it means.