Revisiting Ameghino: new 14c dates from ancient human skeletons from the Argentine Pampas

POLITIS, G; BARRIENTOS, G.; STAFFORD, T.

Pouplements et Préhistoire en Amérique

Éditions du Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques

Lugar: París; Año: 2011; p. 43 - 53

In South America, the chronology assigned to early human remains has been controversial since the middle o f the 19th Century. Based on several human remains finfings, Argentinean scientist Florentino Ameghino proposed not only the great antiquity of the peopling of this region, but also that modern humans and their forerunners originated in South America. In the early 1900`s, physical anthropologist Ales Hrdlicka firmly distrusted any claim about ancient humans in the Americas and after a thorough examination of the avaliable evidence, discounted all of Ameghino`s conclusions, Althoug Hrdlicka´s authoritative criticism almost extingished the debate about the existence of Late Pleistocene humans in the New Word, none of this statements indicating that Ameghinos putative Plio-Pleistocene human remains were recent has ever been tested. The aim of this papers is to present new AMS rediocarbon dataobtained from three human skeletons that Ameghino originally interpreted to be either Pliocene or Pleistocene in age.