“…The region is geographically the most distant from Beringia, the entry point of the first settlers of the Americas, and the archaeological record shows that humans arrived in the SCSA roughly 14.3 thousand years ago (kya) ( Dillehay et al., 2008 ; Politis and Prates, 2018 ), shortly after the initial colonization of the continent (∼16 kya, based on ancient DNA ( Llamas et al., 2016 )), indicating a rapid spread southwards ( Bodner et al., 2012 ; Prates et al., 2020 ). A growing body of genetic research addressing the population history of the SCSA has focused mostly on the southernmost archaeological and extant groups from Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego ( Lalueza et al., 1997 ; García-Bour et al., 2004 ; de Saint Pierre et al., 2012b ; de la Fuente et al., 2015 , 2018 ; Crespo et al., 2017 , 2018 ; Nakatsuka et al., 2020b ). However, despite its potential importance for the peopling of this region, only a few recent studies included populations from the eastern sector of the SCSA, the Argentinian Pampas ( Figure 1 ) ( Perez et al., 2009 ; Llamas et al., 2016 ; Posth et al., 2018 ; Postillone et al., 2020b ).…”