Abstract
The early peopling of the Americas has been one of the most hotly contested topics in American anthropology and a research issue that draws archaeologists into a multidisciplinary debate. In South America, although the background data on this issue has increased exponentially in recent decades, the core questions related to the temporal and spatial patterns of the colonization process remain open. In this paper we tackle these questions in the light of the quantitative analysis of a screened radiocarbon database of more than 1600 early dates. We explore the frequency of radiocarbon dates as proxies for assessing population growth; and define a reliable and statistically well supported lower chronological bound (not to the exact date) for the earliest human arrival. Our results suggest that the earliest chronological threshold for the peopling of South America should be between 16,600 and 15,100, with a mean estimated date ~ 15,500 cal BP (post Last Glacial Maximum). Population would have grown until the end of Antarctic Cold Reversal stadial ~12,500 cal BP at the time of the main extinctions of megafauna–, when the increase rate slows, probably as a result of the changes that occurred in the trophic niche of humans.
Highlights
The early peopling of the Americas has been one of the most hotly contested topics in American anthropology [1,2,3,4,5,6] and a research issue that draws archaeologists into a multidisciplinary debate [7]
During recent decades several pre-15,000 cal BP archaeological sites/levels have been considered as presumptive candidates for the earliest evidence of a human presence in South America, they have not been included in our analysis because we consider that they do not meet standard validation requirements
The results of this paper suggest that humans entered South America between 16,600 and 15,100 cal BP, which is in disagreement with several claims of a high antiquity entry based on presumed long chronology sites in Brazil [11] and Uruguay [55]
Summary
The early peopling of the Americas has been one of the most hotly contested topics in American anthropology [1,2,3,4,5,6] and a research issue that draws archaeologists into a multidisciplinary debate [7]. The time of the early peopling has been probably the main controversial point in the debate. From the early 1960s onward there have been numerous hypotheses that can be summarised in accordance with the three main competing models for the early peopling of the Americas [1, 5, 9].
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