Most scholars now believe that people first entered the new world through the Bering land bridge more than 16,000 years ago. After entering Alaska, it is not known whether they colonized the hemisphere by moving down the Pacific coast, by inland routes or both. The general view is that the early immigrants would have spread down the coast much faster than they could move inland because they could exploit familiar coastal resources more readily and get much of their food from the sea. However, evidence to support the coastal migration theory has been particularly hard to find because sea levels at the time were about 200 feet lower than today: As the sea level rose, it would have covered most of the early coastal settlements.
According to Dillehay, the new Monte Verde findings provide additional support for the coastal migration theory but, at the same time, raise the possibility that the process may have been considerably slower than currently envisioned.
At the time it was inhabited, Monte Verde was situated on a small tributary of a large river. It was about 400 feet above sea level and located more than 50 miles from the coast and about 10 miles from a large marine bay. Despite its inland location, the researchers identified a total of nine different species of seaweed and algae in the material collected at the site -- material that the Monte Verdeans must have brought from the coast and the bay. The researchers have also found a variety of other beach or coastal resources, including flat beach pebbles, water plants from brackish estuaries and bitumen.
"Finding seaweed wasn't a surprise, but finding five new species in the abundance that we found them was a surprise," said Dillehay. "There are other coastal resources at the site. The Monte Verdeans were really like beachcombers: The number and frequency of these items suggests very frequent contact with the coast, as if they had a tradition of exploiting coastal resources."
In addition, the scientists have found a number of inland resources, such as the gomphothere meat, in the ancient village. This suggests that the group was moving back and forth between different ecological zones, a process called transhumance.
"It takes time to adapt to these inland resources and then come back out to the coast. The other coastal sites that we have found also show inland contacts. If all the early American groups were following a similar pattern of moving back and forth between inland and coastal areas, then the peopling of the Americas may not have been the blitzkrieg movement to the south that people have presumed, but a much slower and more deliberate process," Dillehay observed.
Members of the research team included Carlos Remirez, Mario Pino and Daniela Pino-Navarro from the Universidad Austral de Chile; Michael B. Collins from the University of Texas, Austin; and Jack Rossen from Ithaca College.
The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Fondo Nacional de Desarrollo Cientifico y Tecnológica, the National Geographic Society and the Universidad de Chile.
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Adapted from materials provided by Vanderbilt University.
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New Evidence From Earliest Known Human Settlement In The Americas.
ScienceDaily. Retrieved November 5, 2008, from
http://www.sciencedaily.com /releases/2008/05/080508143324.htm
