The Andes Three Thousand Years Ago
The world in which the Punín-2 man lived was one that archaeology and paleoecology have characterized in some detail, even if the specific individual remains unknown to us beyond the skull.
Three thousand to four thousand years ago, the Chimborazo region of Ecuador was inhabited by hunter-gatherer populations who exploited the specific resources of the high-altitude páramo ecosystem. The páramo — from approximately 3,200 to 4,700 meters elevation in this region — is a landscape dominated by tussock grasses, small shrubs, and the characteristic frailejones (Espeletia species), large rosette plants with woolly leaves adapted to the cold and intense UV radiation of the high Andes.
The animals of the páramo included deer, tapirs, rabbits, and various birds, all of which would have been hunted by the populations who lived in this environment. Small camelids — ancestors or relatives of the modern llamas and alpacas that are so characteristic of Andean culture — may have been present in their wild form, hunted rather than herded at this pre-domestication or early-domestication stage.
Below the páramo, in the inter-Andean valleys where the altitude drops and conditions become more temperate, additional resources would have been available. The Chimborazo region’s geography — high volcanic peaks flanking inter-Andean valleys — creates a diversity of ecological zones within relatively short horizontal distances, and the hunter-gatherer populations of the region would likely have exploited multiple zones as they moved through the landscape following seasonal resource availability.
The settlement pattern for hunter-gatherer populations in this kind of environment is typically mobile: seasonal movements between highland and lowland zones, with specific locations used repeatedly as camps during particular seasons or for particular activities. The archaeological record of such populations tends to be sparse — small sites with limited material remains, because people who move frequently don’t accumulate the material deposits that settled agricultural populations do.
The ravine near Punín, where both skulls were found, may have been a specific location in the landscape that was used repeatedly for burial or other activities that generated accumulations of material. The presence of both Pleistocene megafauna fossils and human remains in the same ravine, regardless of their different ages, suggests that the ravine was a place where things ended up over a very long period — whether through natural processes of erosion and deposition or through active human use.
The man who died there around 3,000 to 4,000 years ago, and whose skull eventually came to light in the 1970s when a farmer noticed it in the ravine, was the end point of a long journey: from the first crossing of Beringia by modern humans perhaps 15,000 or more years before his birth, through the rapid spread of populations across both American continents, through the thousands of years during which the specific ecological knowledge and cultural practices of high-altitude Andean hunter-gatherers accumulated and developed, to the specific man who lived in the Chimborazo highlands and died at approximately age 50 and whose skull survived the millennia to eventually look back at the world as a reconstructed face.