INVESTIGADORES
POLITIS Gustavo Gabriel
capítulos de libros
Título:
Earliest humans in the Americas
Autor/es:
POLITIS, GUSTAVO
Libro:
McGraw Hill Yearbook of Science& Technology
Editorial:
McGraw Hill YB of Science & Technology
Referencias:
Lugar: New York; Año: 2010; p. 123 - 128
Resumen:
The Americas were the last continents (except
for Antarctica) colonized by Homo sapiens (that
is, anatomically modern humans) and they represented the end of the road or final stage of the
global expansion process that started in sub-Saharan
Africa around 100,000 years ago. Although some researchers in the past postulated that the origin of
humankind was in South America, currently all of
the available data support the model that humans
migrated to the American continents as Homo sapiens at the end of the Pleistocene (an epoch spanning about 1.8 million to 10,000 years ago and commonly characterized as when the earth entered its
most recent phase of widespread glaciation). This
means that no ancestors of Homo sapiens ever occupied or evolved in the Americas. Although this
has been a highly contested debate, it seems that
Neandertals lived in the Old World until roughly
30,000 years ago (when they became extinct), coexisting with the ancestors of modern humans who
had expanded throughout the Old World from Africa
between 100,000 and 60,000 years ago. The descendants of these modern humans then entered the
Americas sometime at the very end of the Pleistocene.