Other early sites include El Abra, a rock shelter in the Zipaquirá-Tocancipá area also in Cundinamarca, which has yielded evidence of human occupation extending back roughly 12,000 years before present.

The El Abra site is significant because it is one of the earliest sites on the plateau with evidence for long-term, repeated occupation — a rock shelter that offered natural shelter and was apparently used by human groups repeatedly over many millennia.

These early Altiplano inhabitants — the people who hunted mastodons at Tibitó and sheltered at El Abra — predated the Checua group by at least 5,000 years.

Whether they were biologically related to the Checua lineage is unknown.