Colombia is where the Andes begin, where the Caribbean and Pacific coasts of South America start, where the great river basins of the Orinoco and Amazon originate.

For populations moving southward from North America into South America during the period of the initial peopling of the Americas, Colombia was the first major landscape they would have encountered after crossing the Darién.

The country’s extraordinary geographic diversity — high-altitude Andean highlands, Caribbean lowlands, Pacific rainforests, Amazonian basins, llanos grasslands — means that any population moving through it would have faced immediate choices about which ecological zones to occupy and what routes to follow southward.

The lack of ancient DNA data from Colombia before 2025 thus represented a significant gap in our understanding of how the initial peopling of South America proceeded.