The highland forest offered a range of plant foods, including tubers and roots that could be harvested year-round even when surface crops were unreliable.

The people who lived here at 6,000 years before present were not the first.

The Altiplano has yielded evidence of human occupation stretching back to at least 11,500 years before present at sites like Tibitó, one of the oldest dated archaeological sites on the plateau, where tools were found alongside the bones of extinct Pleistocene animals.

The Checua individuals at 6,000 years were thus part of a long lineage of Altiplano occupation, though whether there was biological continuity between the earliest inhabitants and the Checua-period people cannot yet be determined from the current genetic data.

By 6,000 years before present, the cultural pattern on the Altiplano had evolved toward the construction of more substantial settlements.