A team of archaeologists from the American universities of Maine, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Illinois and Connecticut, the German University of Tübingen and the Earth Sciences Building in Canada have recorded a human settlement of more than 12,000 years ago in the Peruvian Andes, at 4,500 meters of altitude, which makes this archaeological site the highest in the late Pleistocene found to date in the entire world.
High-altitude regions have been little studied by archeology , which has not yet been able to explain well how the first humans were able to survive in those environments. While some experts suggest that they had to adapt genetically over many thousands of years , others believe that environmental changes, such as the recession of glaciers, which contributed to making these regions more habitable, were more decisive.
According to Kurt Rademaker, from the University of Maine, ” the study of human adaptation to extreme environments is important to understand our cultural and genetic capacity for survival .” The researchers assure that some group of hunter-gatherers was able to colonize this remote, inhospitable and treeless place more than 12,000 years ago, despite the low temperatures, high solar radiation and the poor level of oxygen that there is more of 4,000 meters. That’s only 2,000 years after the first human settlers arrived in South America.
The proof is that in Cuncaicha, a rocky shelter with two niches at an altitude of 4,480 meters, they have found tools, animal bones and roots that were consumed as food . Experts think that this site could have served as a base camp.
In turn, the site called Cuenca Pucuncho, at 4,355 meters, would have been the ideal setting for specialized hunting. At this site, archaeologists have found 260 stone tools and artifacts, such as projectile points, up to 12,800 years old. Its inhabitants were dedicated to hunting vicuña and later grazing domesticated alpacas and llamas.
The discovery suggests that human adaptation to extreme high mountain environments may have occurred much earlier than previously thought . And is that the oldest human settlement at this altitude recorded so far was dated almost a millennium later. “The Pucuncho Basin sites suggest that Pleistocene humans successfully adapted to extreme altitude and were able to live and thrive in the Andean highlands,” say the scientists who participated in the study.
