Tom Dillehay on the First People in South America

It is not known when and where the first humans migrated to the Americas. Given the presence of valid archeological sites, dated to between 12,500 and 11,000 years ago, it is likely that people arrived in the Southern Hemisphere no later than 15,000 to 14,000 years ago. Further, we are a long way from being able to specify all of the conditions under which these first human adaptations occurred in the Southern Hemisphere. As a starting point, we must recognize that the key issue is not rapid, blitzkrieg movement but efficient adaptation of technological, socioeconomic, and ideational practices over several generations within different local and regional populations. We must also develop research questions and strategies to study these practices on a comparative local and hemispherical basis that may lead us to significant insights into the plasticity of the late Pleistocene human populations. With more research, we should see that these populations were far more subculturally and temporally variable than has previously been envisioned.

Tom D. Dillehay. 1999. The Late Pleistocene cultures of South America. Evolutionary Anthropology 7(6):215