The pre-clovis peopling of South America

Abstract

The peopling of America is perhaps one of the longest and most controversial debates in world archaeology, and South America has played a central role in this debate. There have been several competing models for the first peopling of the Americas, although except for the hypothesis of an Atlantic-Solutrean migration, there ismajor agreement among archaeologists and ancient geneticists that the first colonizers entered America from Northeastern Asia via Beringia and shorelines. South America is fundamental to this basic agreement and is considered the final step in the continents colonization. In this paper we present the corrent state of the debate about the early peopling of South America.