The colonization of the South American continent by human populations occurred in two distinct phases , according to a Stanford University study published in Nature . Between 30,000 and 15,000 years ago, several groups crossed the Bering Strait, at that time an icy corridor that connected Asia and Alaska.
Those first Americans, descendants of ancestral Siberians, slowly made their way down North America until they reached South America some 14,500 years ago through Panama or along the western coast of the continent.
Until now, the process of human colonization in this area of the world remained a mystery . But the Stanford researchers have managed to reconstruct the history of the growth of the South American population thanks to the compilation of a database from 1,147 archaeological sites with 5,464 radiocarbon dates.
Their results suggest that a first wave was deployed along the Pacific coast, in the territory now occupied by Peru, Chile and Ecuador . According to Amy Goldberg, director of the study, 14,000 years ago there was a rapid deployment of populations that settled in small settlements , and this process lasted for a long period of 8,000 years. In a more recent phase, starting 5,500 years ago, there was a demographic boom and population growth increased significantly, thanks to a sedentary lifestyle and the emergence of agriculture.
Since then, and until the beginning of our era, the demography in South America tripled, which constitutes a phase of human spread across the continent different from the patterns observed in North America, Europe and Australia. Amy Goldberg and her team of researchers believe that human behavior between 14,000 and 5,500 years ago is similar to that of other species , from bacteria to plants, birds and mammals invading a new environment.
For 8,000 years its population was small, but it expanded very rapidly. In this phase there were boom and bust cycles: the human population grew, but they depleted available resources and saturated ecosystems , leading to a sharp slowdown in demographics .
However, what happened in the second phase – between 5,500 and 2,000 years ago – is exclusively human . At that time, populations settled in stable societies and experienced exponential growth, without being affected by the environment, as is the case today, although not so drastically.
On the other hand, although the geographical characteristics of the continent and genetic studies suggest that colonization occurred from the north to the south, many of the first archaeological remains of South America are in Patagonia , but probably by then humans were already widespread. over a large part of the territory in small coastal towns. The fact that the ocean level was about 100 meters lower 14,000 years ago suggests that much of the first settlements in the north of the continent are currently under water .
