To browse Academia. Herbert S. Klein and Daniel C. C, Journal of The American College of Surgeons, Log in with Facebook Log in with Google. Remember me on this computer. Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link. Need an account? Click here to sign up. Lepper T he story of the peopling of the Americas is about humans discovering and settling a truly New World. Curiously, archaeologists sometimes lose sight of the actual people involved, presumably because they so seldom encounter their physical remains.
Yet, without diminishing the importance of the stones and animal bones upon which the understanding of the irst Americans largely has been based Adovasio ; Bonnichsen and Turnmire ; Dillehay ; Ubelaker , it must be recognized that without the remains of the people themselves and the information contained in their bones, graves, and funerary oferings, the view is of a stage littered with fragments of scenery and discarded props, but with no actors. One survey of human remains from late Paleolithic Europe listed 56 individuals from the period between 15, and 10, years ago Holt and Formicola Information is known on 74 sets of human remains from the same period in North America Table 1.
Europe has an area over 10 million square kilometers, whereas North America, including Canada, the United States, and Mexico, encompass about 22 million square kilometers. Therefore, in Europe there are about 5. Clearly, the density of documented human remains is lower in North America, but since the documented European Upper Paleolithic human paleontological record encompasses about 2, more years than the equivalent record in North America, some of the discrepancy can be attributed to the accumulation of burials over those additional centuries.
Moreover, the vastly greater extent of the late Pleistocene glaciation in North America relative to Europe meant that a greater proportion of its landmass would have been inaccessible to human occupation for much of this period. Finally, modern humans had entered Europe by perhaps 40, years ago, which means that by 15, years ago populations in many parts of Europe likely approached carrying capacity.
In contrast, humans either were not yet present in the Americas, or had only recently arrived by 15, years ago, and it would be many centuries before population levels reached a density equivalent to that which characterized Europe at the beginning of this period. All of this suggests that human remains are not anomalously rare in the western hemisphere and that understanding of the earliest Americans is being hampered by the perception that such discoveries are rarer than they actually are.
