I've been really interested in Latin America lately. I don't know why but that's not an issue at all and I'm not about to complain about being fascinated by something and motivated to learn two languages all of a sudden. I started by just reading the Wikipedia page top-to-bottom; this was for a brief overview and an idea of where to look next. However, I'm only 20% through it and already perplexed by the paragraph on the Pre-Columbian history of Latin America. The first three sentences are:
The earliest known settlement was identified at Monte Verde, near Puerto Montt in Southern Chile. Its occupation dates to some 14,000 years ago and there is some disputed evidence of even earlier occupation. Over the course of millennia, people spread to all parts of the continents.
This implies that humans have been settling in the Americas for fourteen millennia. However, a couple of sentences later, we read:
The earliest settlements in the Americas are of the Las Vegas Culture[33] from about 8000 BCE and 4600 BCE, a sedentary group from the coast of Ecuador, the forefathers of the more known Valdivia culture, of the same era.
Forgive me if I am misinterpreting this information entirely. I am not accustomed to the language used in articles about the history of humanity and civilisation; for example, I don't actually know whether 'settlements' count as 'civilisation'. That being said, don't the two extracts above directly contradict each other? The former says settlements occurred fourteen millennia ago, while the latter says the earliest settlements occurred just ten millennia ago. Am I not understanding the flow of time? It's possible, I'm not trying to be facetious. I'm really not a smart cookie, and I was hoping this community could help me out.
Further to this confusion, I was under the impression that humans entered the Americas over the Bering Strait when it was frozen over. If this is the case, why did they go all the way to Southern Chile to settle? If not, how did they get there?
Thanks for reading <3
Further to this confusion, I was under the impression that humans entered the Americas over the Bering Strait when it was frozen over. If this is the case, why did they go all the way to Southern Chile to settle? If not, how did they get there?
During the peak of the last glaciation, what's now the Bering Strait wasn't frozen over. Instead, all the water locked up in the continental ice sheets had lowered sea levels and exposed a vast coastal plain linking Asia and North America, which we call Beringia today. All things considered, the region was relatively pleasant as far as the Ice Age Arctic was concerned. Still a treeless tundra, but at least it wasn't covered in ice.
Genetic evidence suggests humans reached Beringia around 25-28,000 years ago. This is around the time that the ancestors of modern Native American populations become genetically distinct from their relations in Eurasia. From there, people pushed south, first into North America. Because almost the entirety of Canada was covered in immense ice sheets, the most likely route humans took at the time was along the Pacific coast. This coastal route would have allowed people to travel into South America relatively rapidly. The current dating on Monte Verde suggests humans were active in the area as early as 18,500 years ago.
Further north though, we know people reached Appalachian Mountains and the east coast of North America by at least 16,000 years ago thanks to sites like Meadowcroft in Pennsylvania and Cactus Hill in Virginia. Both also have evidence suggesting human occupation between 19-20,000 years ago, but these are more controversial dates.
All three of these sites (Monte Verde, Meadowcroft, and Cactus Hill) are among the best preserved pre-Clovis Paleoindian sites. Monte Verde, in particularly, is exceptionally well preserved, which is why we have more reliable early dates from that site than the others. "Pre-Clovis" means that they pre-date the Clovis Culture, which for a long time was thought to represent the earliest Native American population, around 13,000 years ago. This was when the Canadian icesheets were breaking up, allowing the first overland migrations into North America from Beringia. Now, as our understanding of pre-Clovis societies has improved, it's looking more and more like the "Clovis Culture" is an artificial construct. What we're actually seeing is more likely a spread of a particularly useful technology - the Clovis point - between multiple pre-existing cultures rather the migration of a single culture. Also, the Clovis point appears to originate in the Tennessee Valley and spread outward from there, rather than coming down from Beringia as originally assumed.
Once the last glaciation ends and the climate starts stabilizing after some initial hiccups in the early Holocene, we start to see evidence for cultivation and the beginnings of agriculture. The region of Ecuador you mentioned is one of the earliest places we see this, but there's also early agriculture underway in Mesoamerica too; the Guilá Naquitz site in Oaxaca has evidence of squash domestication around this same time. Squash is also the first plant domesticated in what's now the US, independent of what's going on further south, but this happens quite a bit later. Permanent settlements start appearing in the Archaic as well, though not all of them are associated with agriculture. In some places, wild sources of food remain plentiful enough to support large, permanent populations. As an example from the end of the Archaic period, there's Poverty Point in northern Louisiana, which seems to have supported a population of about 5,000 people or more without relying on farming - despite agriculture being widely practiced by people in the middle Mississippi and Ohio river valleys at the time (around 3700-2700 years ago).
Norte Chico, also known as Caral, is the earliest known society in the Americas widely regarded as a "civilization," establishing the city of Caral around 4600 years ago in northern Peru. I'm sure one of our South American archaeologists can fill you in on the details of Norte Chico if you wanted to ask about that.