South America: Ancient man living at 4,500 meters 12,400 years ago

[Ichingcarpenter]

The first South Americans: Extreme living
After humans arrived in South America, they quickly spread into some of its most remote corners.


This is a long article with a great map that shows how far even quartz was traded all over South America.



The landscape looks bleak, but Rademaker views it through the eyes of the people who built a fire in the rock shelter, named Cuncaicha, about 12,400 years ago. These hunter-gatherers were some of the earliest known residents of South America and they chose to live at this extreme altitude — higher than any Ice Age encampment found thus far in the New World. Despite the thin air and sub-freezing night-time temperatures, this plain would have seemed a hospitable neighbourhood to those people, says Rademaker, an archaeologist at the University of Maine in Orono.

“The basin has fresh water, camelids, stone for toolmaking, combustible fuel for fires and rock shelters for living in,” he says. “Basically, everything you need to live is here. This is one of the richest basins I've seen, and it probably was then, too.”


SNIP

Tool trade
Farther south, César Méndez has followed similar clues in his search for late-Pleistocene sites along the Chilean coast. Beginning in 2004, Méndez, an anthropologist at the University of Chile in Santiago, and his colleagues excavated an ancient encampment, which they dated to around 13,000 years ago4.

Some of the stone tools at the site, called Quebrada Santa Julia, were made of translucent quartz that is not found in coastal deposits. Like Rademaker, Méndez mapped potential paths towards known quartz deposits inland. Sampling along those routes, his team found an outcrop of translucent quartz at a site where people had lived and quarried between 12,600 and 11,400 years ago. The similarity with Quebrada Santa Julia in terms of age and tool-making techniques suggests that the coastal tools came from these mountain outcrops.


http://www.nature.com/polopoly_fs/7.20295.1412171364!/image/Nature-south-america-map-archeology-02.10.14.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_630/Nature-south-america-map-archeology-02.10.14.jpg

AND MUCH MORE:

http://www.nature.com/news/the-first-south-americans-extreme-living-1.16038

[Judi Lynn]

1. What fascinating work! Great article. Thank you. n/t