Evidence of early occupations by hunter-gatherers in diverse tropical forests is increasing the world over (e.g. Gorman 1971; Pavlides & Gosden 1994), even in America (Roosevelt et al. 1996). This paper reports them in northern South America. Several lines of evidence suggest that many kinds of forests, some or all without modern analogues, existed in the American tropics during glacial times and remained there, with changing composition, until the present. According to evidence presented here, human beings adapted to those forests in northern South America since, at least, the end of the Pleistocene.

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Resumen En las dos o tres últimas décadas el multiculturalismo ha puesto en marcha cambios profundos, especialmente con res-

This article promotes the hypothesis that the massive demographic collapse of the native populations of the Americas triggered by the European colonization brought about the abandonment of large expanses of agricultural fields soon recovered by forests, which in due turn fixed atmospheric CO2 in significant quantities. This hypothesis is supported by measurements of atmospheric CO2 levels in ice cores from Law Dome, Antarctica. Changing the focus from paleoclimate to global population dynamics and using the same causal chain, the measured drop in historic atmospheric CO2 levels can also be looked upon as further, strong evidence for the postconquest demographic collapse of the Americas.

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