Hunter-Gatherer Foraging and Colonization of the Western Emisphere - Kelly - 1999

A foraging model that incorporates the effect that naïve fauna would have on the foraging return rates and subsequent residential mobility of those hunter-gatherers who first entered the New World is used to propose that a rapid colonization would be expected in the particular Late Pleistocene environment of the northern New World. Analysis of uncorrected radiocarbon dates from the earliest sites in Beringia, North and South America show that regardless of whether Clovis is accepted as the earliest evidence of occupation, or whether sites such as Monte Verde and Meadowcroft are used, the rate of migration across the New World was much higher than that across Siberia, as the model predicts. As suggested by Todd and Kelly in 1988, the initial occupants of the New World were a hunting and gathering society that combined elements commonly associated today with arctic hunters with those associated with tropical foragers. No easy ethnographic analogy for Paleo-Indians exists in the ethnographic record.

Keywords

Colonization of the New World - Modelling - Late Pleistocene foragers - Late Pleistocene environments of the Americas

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