The early appearance of civilizations in South America does not contradict the Bering Strait colonization theory. None of these civilizations is even close to the youngest estimate for the first human dispersal into the New World across the Bering Strait.

There is some evidence from DNA variation among chickens, of all things, that suggests there may have been contacts between Polynesians and the western coast of South America within the last thousand years, but the oldest plausible dates for such contacts are much younger than the oldest complex societies in the Andes.