title: Homo sapiens in the Americas. Overview of the earliest human expansion in the New World.
abstract: Although it is widely recognised that America was the last continent to be populated by our species, researchers' views on various aspects of this process (e.g. the period in which it occurred, the area from which the colonizing populations came, the number of dispersal waves and the routes taken by these migrations) differ significantly. In this paper, we review both classical data and more recent findings from various research fields - including geology, paleoecology, archaeology, skeletal biology, and genetics - that may shed light on the dynamics of the colonization of the American continent, according to a critical reappraisal of the various hypotheses and models that have been advanced over time to explain this process.
authors.affiliation: Dipartimento di Biologia Ambientale, Sapienza Universitá di Roma, Piazzale Aldo Moro 5, 00185 Roma, Italy, giorgio.manzi@uniroma1.it.
authors.forename: Aurelio
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Marangoni
authors.affiliation: Dipartimento di Biologia Evoluzionistica, Universitá di Firenze, Via del Proconsolo 12, 50122 Firenze, Italy.
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Caramelli
authors.affiliation: Dipartimento di Biologia Ambientale, Sapienza Universitá di Roma, Piazzale Aldo Moro 5, 00185 Roma, Italy.
authors.forename: Giorgio
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Manzi
mesh_terms: D000569:Americas; D000885:Anthropology, Physical; D001106:Archaeology; D005075:Biological Evolution; D049690:History, Ancient; D063426:Human Migration / Q000266:history*; D006801:Humans