Remote islands aside , Argentina ’s “ Southern Cone ” was probably one of the last berth on Earth to be lodge in by humans . A study of bones deposited at the archeologic shot site Arroyo Seco 2 make the eccentric that humans reached the area at least 14,000 years ago , substantially earlier than antecedently suspected . Such an arriver would easy predate the Clovis acculturation , once guess to have been responsible for taking humans to the extremities of the Americas .
The Arroyo Seco 2 site ( not to be confused with the urban center Arroyo Seco further northward ) check a deep store of mammal ivory from late in the last Ice Age . Dr Gustavo Politisof the National University of Central Buenos Aires claims to have find grounds that many of these osseous tissue were institute there by humans and butcher using stone tools .
The off-white have been dated to between 13,000 and 14,000 years ago , an accidentally former clock time for humans to have get so far south .
InPLOS One , Politis present a detailed discipline of the Arroyo Seco 2 internet site . He memorialize lashings of bones from nonextant Ice Age mammal , along with an even prominent number of what he call off “ lithic artifacts ” , in the first place stones that appear to have been shaped into tools .
A stage bone from an out South American sawhorse from three slant ( A ) . A detailed view of notches and flake - cicatrice that are thought to have been made by rock prick , rather than tooth ; the dotted line exemplify the maximal depth and breadth of notches and flake - scars . Politis et al / PLOS ONE
Politis admits there are non - human explanation for the old discovery – some of the brute may just have died at this localisation , and stones may have been shaped more recently or conk out by other strength . However , the vapourous volume of cloth , most of it concentrated at deepness between 0.4 and 1.1 meters ( 1.3 and 3.6 feet ) , suggests human involvement .
The fact that people were at Arroyo Seco 2 is less important than when they got there . Precise date of specimen such as these can be hard , and when Politis had unlike laboratories date the same specimens , he got estimate that wide-ranging by up to 5,000 years – a huge difference on this form of timescale . Much of the variation comes from the way the research laboratory treat the bone prior to analysis . To reduce the doubtfulness , Politis had eight laboratory around the world working on 14 specimens . He concludes that the “ earliest human signal ” was 14,064 years ago and occupation of the land site continued periodically for a thousand days .
Anthropologists consort that humans make the Americas by thwart what is now the Bering Strait towards the end of the last Ice Age , and dispersed through North and South America from there . However , much debate continues on the timing and origins of the great migrations that brought people to character of the continents for the first clock time .
Most former human remain in the Americas make out from the Clovis culture , who probably arrived 13,000 years ago and representthe ancestorsof almost all living Native Americans . For a recollective time , the predominant hypothesis held that most of the Americas were first conquered by Clovis people . However , in late years this hasbeen challengedwith discoveries of what appear to be pre - Clovis settlements in many parts of the continents , and Politis considers his discovery powerful evidence that South America was inhabited long before the comer of the Clovis multitude .
Map testify Arroyo Sec 2 ’s fix , with a photograph of the dig site . Politis et al / PLOS ONE
