During the final stage of the Pleistocene-Holocene transition, a few herds of huge herbivores still roamed around parts of the Central Valley, especially near bodies of water such as the now-disappeared Tagua Tagua lagoon. While groups in the rest of the territory evolved towards hunting and gathering modern resources, the megafuna-hunter way of life remained as a relic in these ecological refuges until around 9000 B.C. By that time, the newer hunter-gatherer groups had expanded throughout the territory. Their remains have been found in large cemeteries such as Las Cenizas, located in Lago Peñuelas National Reserve, in the mountain rock shelters of the El Manzano ravine in the Maipo Valley, and in open air camps, such as those discovered at Montenegro, north of Santiago.
Around 300 B.C., these groups witnessed the arrival of horticulture and ceramic making, but not all of them changed their way of life as a result. Thus, some bands of nomadic hunter-gatherers coexisted and interacted with the more sedentary horticulturalists such as the Llolleo and Bato peoples, at least until around 1000 A.D. After that time, groups practicing that earlier way of life remained only in the highest reaches of the Andes Mountains, although some eventually made their way down to the Central Valley as late as the mid-19th century. Curiously, evidence available to date shows that during this period there were no groups on the coast of this region thatsubsisted on the extraction of marine resources.