Publication Date:
2014-10-25
Description:
Study of human adaptation to extreme environments is important for understanding our cultural and genetic capacity for survival. The Pucuncho Basin in the southern Peruvian Andes contains the highest-altitude Pleistocene archaeological sites yet identified in the world, about 900 meters above confidently dated contemporary sites. The Pucuncho workshop site [4355 meters above sea level (masl)] includes two fishtail projectile points, which date to about 12.8 to 11.5 thousand years ago (ka). Cuncaicha rock shelter (4480 masl) has a robust, well-preserved, and well-dated occupation sequence spanning the past 12.4 thousand years (ky), with 21 dates older than 11.5 ka. Our results demonstrate that despite cold temperatures and low-oxygen conditions, hunter-gatherers colonized extreme high-altitude Andean environments in the Terminal Pleistocene, within about 2 ky of the initial entry of humans to South America.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Rademaker, Kurt -- Hodgins, Gregory -- Moore, Katherine -- Zarrillo, Sonia -- Miller, Christopher -- Bromley, Gordon R M -- Leach, Peter -- Reid, David A -- Alvarez, Willy Yepez -- Sandweiss, Daniel H -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2014 Oct 24;346(6208):466-9. doi: 10.1126/science.1258260.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Department of Anthropology, South Stevens Hall, University of Maine, Orono, ME 04469-5773, USA. Department of Early Prehistory and Quaternary Ecology, Schloss Hohentubingen, Burgsteige 11, 72070 Tubingen, Germany. Climate Change Institute, Bryand Global Sciences Center, University of Maine, Orono, ME 04469, USA. kurt.rademaker@umit.maine.edu. ; Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Laboratory, Department of Physics and School of Anthropology, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA. ; University of Pennsylvania Museum, 3260 South Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA. ; Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, Earth Sciences Building, Room 806, 844 Campus Place Northwest, Calgary, British Columbia, Canada. ; Institute for Archaeological Sciences, University of Tubingen, Rumelinstrasse 23, 72070 Tubingen, Germany. Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Paleoenvironment, University of Tubingen, Rumelinstrasse 23, 72070 Tubingen, Germany. ; Climate Change Institute, Bryand Global Sciences Center, University of Maine, Orono, ME 04469, USA. ; Department of Anthropology, 354 Mansfield Road, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT 06269-1176, USA. ; Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois at Chicago, Behavioral Sciences Building, 1007 West Harrison Street, Chicago, IL 60607-7139, USA. ; Arequipa, Peru. ; Department of Anthropology, South Stevens Hall, University of Maine, Orono, ME 04469-5773, USA. Climate Change Institute, Bryand Global Sciences Center, University of Maine, Orono, ME 04469, USA.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25342802" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
*Acclimatization
;
*Altitude
;
Archaeology
;
Artifacts
;
Humans
;
Peru
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
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