Discovered Art Challenges Views of Native American History

[Queequeg]

SERRA DA CAPIVARA NATIONAL PARK, Brazil — Niede Guidon still remembers her astonishment when she glimpsed the paintings.

Preserved amid the bromeliad-encrusted plateaus that tower over the thorn forests of northeast Brazil, the ancient rock art depicts fierce battles among tribesmen, orgiastic scenes of prehistoric revelry and hunters pursuing their game, spears in hand.

"These were stunning compositions, people and animals together, not just figures alone," said Dr. Guidon, 81, remembering what first lured her and other archaeologists in the 1970s to this remote site where jaguars still prowl.

Hidden in the rock shelters where prehistoric humans once lived, the paintings number in the thousands. Some are thought to be more than 9,000 years old and perhaps even far more ancient. Painted in red ocher, they rank among the most revealing testaments anywhere in the Americas to what life was like millenniums before the European conquest began a mere five centuries ago.

But it is what excavators found when they started digging in the shadows of the rock art that is contributing to a pivotal re-evaluation of human history in the hemisphere.

Researchers at Serra da Capivara National Park unearthed stone tools last year that they say prove that humans reached what is now northeast Brazil as early as 22,000 years ago. Their discovery adds to the growing body of research upending a prevailing belief of 20th-century archaeology in the United States known as the Clovis model, which holds that people first arrived in the Americas from Asia about 13,000 years ago. Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times
Researchers here say they have unearthed stone tools proving that humans reached what is now northeast Brazil as early as 22,000 years ago. Their discovery adds to the growing body of research upending a prevailing belief of 20th-century archaeology in the United States known as the Clovis model, which holds that people first arrived in the Americas from Asia about 13,000 years ago.

"If they're right, and there's a great possibility that they are, that will change everything we know about the settlement of the Americas," said Walter Neves, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of São Paulo whose own analysis of an 11,000-year-old skull in Brazil implies that some ancient Americans resembled aboriginal Australians more than they did Asians.

Up and down the Americas, scholars say that the peopling of lands empty of humankind may have been far more complex than long believed. The radiocarbon dating of spear points found in the 1920s near Clovis, N.M., placed the arrival of big-game hunters across the Bering Strait about 13,000 years ago, long forming the basis of when humans were believed to have arrived in the Americas.

More recently, numerous findings have challenged that narrative. In Texas, archaeologists said in 2011 that they had found projectile points showing that hunter-gatherers had reached another site, known as Buttermilk Creek, as early as 15,500 years ago. Similarly, analysis of human DNA found at an Oregon cave determined that humans were there 14,000 years ago.

But it is in South America, thousands of miles from the New Mexico site where the Clovis spear points were discovered, where archaeologists are putting forward some of the most profound challenges to the Clovis-first theory.

Paleontologists in Uruguay published findings in November suggesting that humans hunted giant sloths there about 30,000 years ago. All the way in southern Chile, Tom D. Dillehay, an anthropologist at Vanderbilt University, has shown that humans lived at a coastal site called Monte Verde as early as 14,800 years ago.

And here in Brazil's caatinga, a semi-arid region of mesas and canyons, European and Brazilian archaeologists building on decades of earlier excavations said last year that they had found artifacts at a rock shelter showing that humans had arrived in South America almost 10,000 years before Clovis hunters began appearing in North America.

"The Clovis paradigm is finally buried," said Eric Boëda, the French archaeologist leading the excavations here.

Exposing the tension over competing claims about where and when humans first arrived in the Americas, some scholars in the dwindling Clovis-first camp in the United States quickly rejected the findings.

Gary Haynes, an archaeologist at the University of Nevada, Reno, argued that the stones found here were not tools made by humans, but instead could have become chipped and broken naturally, by rockfall. Stuart Fiedel, an archaeologist with the Louis Berger Group, an environmental consulting company, said that monkeys might have made the tools instead of humans.

"Monkeys, including large extinct forms, have been in South America for 35 million years," Dr. Fiedel said. He added that the Clovis model was recently bolstered by new DNA analysis ancestrally connecting indigenous peoples in Central and South America to a boy from the Clovis culture whose 12,700-year-old remains were found in 1968 at a site in Montana.

Such dismissive positions have invited equally sharp responses from scholars like Dr. Dillehay, the American archaeologist who discovered Monte Verde. "Fiedel does not know what he is talking about," he said, explaining that similarities existed between the stone tools found here and at the site across South America in Chile. "To say monkeys produced the tools is stupid."

Having their findings disputed is nothing new for the archaeologists working at Serra da Capivara. Dr. Guidon, the Brazilian archaeologist who pioneered the excavations, asserted more than two decades ago that her team had found evidence in the form of charcoal from hearth fires that humans had lived here about 48,000 years ago.

While scholars in the United States generally viewed Dr. Guidon's work with skepticism, she pressed on, obtaining the permission of Brazilian authorities to preserve the archaeological sites near the town of São Raimundo Nonato in a national park that now gets thousands of visitors a year despite its remote location in Piauí, one of Brazil's poorest states.

Dr. Guidon remains defiant about her findings. At her home on the grounds of a museum she founded to focus on the discoveries in Serra da Capivara, she said she believed that humans had reached these plateaus even earlier, around 100,000 years ago, and might have come not overland from Asia but by boat from Africa.

Professor Boëda, who succeeded Dr. Guidon in leading the excavations, said that such early dates may have been possible but that more research was needed. His team is using thermoluminescence, a technique that measures the exposure of sediments to sunlight, to determine their age.

At the same time, discoveries elsewhere in Brazil are adding to the mystery of how the Americas were settled.

In what may be another blow to the Clovis model of humans' coming from northeast Asia, molecular geneticists showed last year that the Botocudo indigenous people living in southeastern Brazil in the late 1800s shared gene sequences commonly found among Pacific Islanders from Polynesia.

How could Polynesians have made it to Brazil? Or aboriginal Australians? Or, if the archaeologists here are correct, how could a population arrive in this hinterland long before Clovis hunters began appearing in the Americas? The array of new discoveries has scholars on a quest for answers.

Reflecting how researchers are increasingly accepting older dates of human migration to the Americas, Michael R. Waters, a geoarchaeologist at Texas A&M University's Center for the Study of the First Americans, said that a "single migration" into the Americas about 15,000 years ago may have given rise to the Clovis people. But he added that if the results obtained here in Serra da Capivara are accurate, they will raise even more questions about how the Americas were settled.

"If so, then whoever lived there never passed on their genetic material to living populations," said Dr. Waters, explaining how the genetic history of indigenous peoples links them to the Clovis child found in Montana. "We must think long and hard about these early sites and how they fit into the picture of the peopling of the Americas."

Link.

[CountDeMoney]

The National Museum of the American Indian in DC has one of the coolest cafes you'll ever find in a museum.  They have regional samplers not just from North American tribes, but the entire hemisphere.  I highly recommend it.

[The Minsky Moment]

I could have told them the Clovis model was flawed.
It should have been obvious to everyone other than Dan Brown that the the indigeneous peoples of the Americas had no connection with the Merovingians.

[derspiess]

The National Museum of the American Indian in DC has one of the coolest cafes you'll ever find in a museum.  They have regional samplers not just from North American tribes, but the entire hemisphere.  I highly recommend it.

Samplers of what?  Tobacco?

[Razgovory]

I could have told them the Clovis model was flawed.
It should have been obvious to everyone other than Dan Brown that the the indigeneous peoples of the Americas had no connection with the Merovingians.

[KRonn]

These are some interesting findings. I've always wondered if people also came to the Americas via Africa or the pacific islands. The Islanders were huge travelers, covering vast distances. It'll be interesting to see how it all works out with these findings or if they're debunked.

[derspiess]

These are some interesting findings. I've always wondered if people also came to the Americas via Africa or the pacific islands. The Islanders were huge travelers, covering vast distances. It'll be interesting to see how it all works out with these findings or if they're debunked.

I read recently that there is strong evidence that Pacific islanders made contact with South America.  This isn't the article I had read but it delves into more detail re: the DNA analysis that was done: http://phys.org/news/2013-01-sweet-potato-dna-early-polynesians.html

[grumbler]

These are some interesting findings. I've always wondered if people also came to the Americas via Africa or the pacific islands. The Islanders were huge travelers, covering vast distances. It'll be interesting to see how it all works out with these findings or if they're debunked.

The islanders were big travelers, but all the evidence is that they were big travelers fairly recently, in historical terms.  If evidence of them arriving in the Americas before, say, 1000 CE were discovered, that would be pretty exciting. Much after that date, though, wouldn't be so surprising.  After all, they reached New Zealand in large numbers by around 1250.

[Razgovory]

People arrived on Easter Island earlier then 1000 AD.  There is some circumstantial evidence of contact with mainland S. America by Polynesians, and it it seems likely to me, but there's not concrete proof.  If they could sail all the way to Easter Island, it's almost certain they could make it to the Americas, and probably did.  Unfortunately due to the low numbers of people involved and the lack of written languages it would be very hard to prove.

[citizen k]

I could have told them the Clovis model was flawed.

I imagine that it will eventually be recognized that the Americas were settled by several waves of migration using different routes.

[alfred russel]

People arrived on Easter Island earlier then 1000 AD.  There is some circumstantial evidence of contact with mainland S. America by Polynesians, and it it seems likely to me, but there's not concrete proof.  If they could sail all the way to Easter Island, it's almost certain they could make it to the Americas, and probably did.  Unfortunately due to the low numbers of people involved and the lack of written languages it would be very hard to prove.

I visited Easter Island a year or two ago.

I don't think the date of settlement has been definitively established to be before 1000.

[grumbler]

I visited Easter Island a year or two ago.

I don't think the date of settlement has been definitively established to be before 1000.

Yes, that's why I used that as the date which would be significant.  The presence of South American-native crops in Polynesia clearly shows that the Polynesians had contact with South America at some point, but any direct evidence of the early contacts will probably have to be found in the Americas.  Very early dates may indicate that the main Islander settlement direction was east to west, rather than the currently-believed west-to-east.

[Caliga]

IIRC there's some island in Chile (I think it's called Moche Island?) where there is some interesting archaeological research going on right now in an effort to directly the the indigenous people of that island to Polynesia.

[Barrister]

Polynesians connecting and trading with the Americas is interesting, but really irrelevant for this question.

Humans only colonized some of the eastern-most polynesian islands within the last 2000 years or so.

HUman habitation of the Americas is dramatically older - as the article says the Clovis model suggests they arrived 13000 years ago, while others are suggesting 22,000 years ago.

[jimmy olsen]

It has been known for a while that southern Chile was populated 13-14k years ago, so this isn't surprising. It would take quite some time for the wave of settlement to reach that far.