Rapid radiation of humans in South America after the last glacial maximum: A radiocarbon-based study

PRATES, LUCIANO; POLITIS, GUSTAVO G.; PEREZ, S. IVAN

PLOS ONE

PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE

Año: 2020 vol. 15

1932-6203

The early peopling of the Americas has been one of the most hotly contested topics in Americananthropology and a research issue that draws archaeologists into a multidisciplinarydebate. In South America, although the background data on this issue has increased exponentiallyin recent decades, the core questions related to the temporal and spatial patternsof the colonization process remain open. In this paper we tackle these questions in the lightof the quantitative analysis of a screened radiocarbon database of more than 1600 earlydates. We explore the frequency of radiocarbon dates as proxies for assessing populationgrowth; and define a reliable and statistically well supported lower chronological bound (notto the exact date) for the earliest human arrival. Our results suggest that the earliest chronologicalthreshold 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 wouldhave grown until the end of Antarctic Cold Reversal stadial ~12,500 cal BP at the time of themain extinctions of megafauna?, when the increase rate slows, probably as a result of thechanges that occurred in the trophic niche of humans.