Concluding remarks and a new agenda

Abstract

The archaeological locality of Piedra Museo, in the central portion of southern Patagonia, constitutes a main reference for the study of the peopling of the Americas, centered in the last region of the American continent to be colonized by humans toward the end of the final phase of the Pleistocene. The hunter-gatherers reached there about 13,000 cal yr ago while other reliable evidence from several sites of South America allow us to infer that the continent was populated around 15,000 and 14,000 cal yr BP. The archaeological and paleoenvironmental evidence points to the main ways of human learning and adaptation in unknown landscapes and environments, and their transformation that took place in the human occupation during the Holocene. The routes followed by the first colonizers into the unfamiliar and varied South American environments led us to formulate two main pathways, that we have named as the Pacific and Atlantic oceans façades. Both peopling streams have different rhythms of advance. The narrow surface available between the Pacific Ocean and the Andean cordillera (less than 300 km width) with short and parallel rivers, should have facilitated a faster population process than that for the immigrant groups who decided to follow the Atlantic Ocean rim. In this sense, we propose that the first explorers that colonized the Pampa regions and the Deseado Massif in Patagonia should have taken the Atlantic rim route. In Piedra Museo locality, the stratigraphic unit 6 (SU6) represents the “Exploration stage” while the SU 4/5 show the “Colonization stage”. Finally, SU2 provided the evidence for the “Territorial consolidation stage”. These three stages appear as well in several archaeological sites of Pampa and Patagonia; thus, this circumstance reinforces our proposal for the South American population process.