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

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

SUBMITTER: Prates L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7375534 | biostudies-literature | 2020

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature