Significant human population on Falklands pre 1492

Any idea whether there was any way for people to have been stranded on those islands.

Any way they could have found a way of surviving?
 
I don't think that wouldn't change anything. In pre-columbian times it's hard to thing in more than a few hundred natives living there. And also remember that Patagonia itself was very isolated place and not very populated also. Most of the languagues that were spoken in the region were isolate languagues. I've once heard that some anthropologists were trying to link the fuegian body paint with the aboriginal culture, what would prove the thesis that austronesians migrated to America before the cross of the Bering Strait.
 
Well, one posibility is to have a group of Yaghans get lost because of a storm near Isla de los Estados. IIRC, currents might take them to the islands. Yagahns traveled with their families, so, if you could enough cannoes toghether and have most of them arriving to Malvinas, I guess they could have survived and given rise to a local population. If their cannoes are damaged, they might be force to remain there, as there aren't any trees in Malvinas. They would have to abandon their way of life an become land-based hunters or fishmen.

I know, this scenario requires a lot of "coincidenses": having a group of Yaghans togheter near Isla de los Estados; their being derailed to the Islands (a pretty long distance); the destruction of their canoes; their survival to the wreckage and their giving rise to a native people. It might still have been possible, but it's not the most likely one.

Another possibility would be to have humans crossing walking at a time when the sea levels were lower. But I'm not sure if sea levels were once low enough to allow humans to cross.

Yet, even if both scenarios seem quite unlikely, it's a fact that canids managed to get there somehow, as Seluco VII said. And quite a few argue that these arrived to the islands with humans, who had to come there in one of the ways stated above (or in a variant of those, i.e., by sea or by land).
 
I don't think that wouldn't change anything. In pre-columbian times it's hard to thing in more than a few hundred natives living there. And also remember that Patagonia itself was very isolated place and not very populated also...

This is right, but I think the history of the place might have differed if the island had been inhabited. Who knows, maybe one of the first explorers find them more valuable than he did IOTL, and the Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, French or the British established an outpost in the XVII or early XVIII centuries. Maybe the French settlement is more succesfull than IOTL. Maybe the British use the natives against the French in the late XVIII century, as the French did in North America. Or maybe the Argentinians ally with the natives and retreat inland when the British come in 1833, instead of surrendering.

Even if nothing change, the natives die soon due to defeats, and the British end up with the islands, their existance might have been "used" by both Argentina and Great Britain (but mostly by Argentina) in their discussions about who's the rightfull owner of the islands. Argentinians might argue that their first inhabitants came from Argentina; the British might argue that the Spanish/Argentinian killed the last natives (asuming they died in the period of Spanish-Argentine control of the islands, 1774-1832), so the British had done nothing but taking something that had already been taking from the original owners.
 
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What do you think would have changed (if anything) had the islands been inhabitanted when the first Europeans came?
 
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