America before: The Key to Earth’s Lost Civilization
By Graham Hancock
10
A SIGNAL FROM THE DREAMTIME?
SKOGLUND AND REICH’S PAPER IN Nature reporting the presence of
Australasian genes in certain populations in the Amazon is titled “Genetic
Evidence for Two Founding Populations of the Americas.”1
It was first
published online on July 21, 2015 (ahead of the print edition, which appeared
on September 3, 2015).
On precisely the same day (before appearing in print in the journal Science
on August 21, 2015), another team of researchers, led by Maanasa Raghavan
and Eske Willerslev, both of the Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of
Copenhagen, published the online version of a paper titled “Genomic
Evidence for the Pleistocene and Recent Population History of Native
Americans.”2
Unlike Skoglund and Reich, who see two founder populations
in the data, Raghavan and Willerslev see only one, arriving in “a single
migration wave from Siberia no earlier than 23 thousand years ago and after
no more than an 8000-year isolation period in Beringia.”3
Raghavan and Willerslev several times drive home the point that the data
they present “are consistent with a single initial migration of all Native
Americans”4
along a route from Siberia via Beringia and that “from that
single migration, there was a diversification of ancestral Native Americans
leading to the formation of northern and southern branches.”5
This is all very neat, tidy, and in certain ways reassuring for those
American archaeologists—a majority—still reeling from posttraumatic shock
following the collapse of the Clovis First dogma. Of course they would have to be in a state of rigid and unyielding denial to continue to shrug off the
perfect storm of evidence from genetics and from sites like Topper, Cactus
Hill, and Monte Verde that relegated Clovis to the trash can of history. But at
least their favored route—from Siberia, across the Bering land bridge—
remains intact and not only that, but Raghavan and Willerslev’s paper also
endorses the currently fashionable “Beringian standstill” model.
If only the geneticists had ended their paper there, archaeological
contentment with it would have been complete. However, because they are
good scientists, Raghavan and Willerslev—just like Skoglund and Reich—
could not ignore the persistent “Australasian signal” that kept cropping up in
the data:
We found that some American populations—including the Aleutian Islanders,
Surui, and Athabascans—are closer to Australo-Melanesians as compared with
other Native Americans, such as North American Ojibwa, Cree, and Algonquin
and the South American Purepecha, Arhuaco, and Wayuu. The Surui are, in fact,
one of the closest Native American populations to East Asians and Australo-Melanesians, the latter including Papuans, non-Papuan Melanesians, Solomon
Islanders, and South East Asian hunter-gatherers such as Aeta.6
As we’ve seen in previous chapters, the archaeological mainstream is an
intensely conservative and territorial scholarly community, resistant to
change, whose deeply embedded prejudices deny that our “Stone Age”
ancestors could have possessed anything other than the most primitive and
rudimentary technological abilities. For orthodox thinkers, it is literally
inconceivable that prehistoric settlers from the general vicinity of Papua New
Guinea could have crossed the entire width of the Pacific Ocean to South
America, and thence made their way to the Amazon to leave evidence of their
presence in the DNA of people still living there today.
What’s paradoxical about this position is that—admittedly after a hardfought struggle—no one in the mainstream now would seriously dispute that
our ancient hominid ancestors were capable of undertaking successful open water voyages to colonize new lands.7
We’ve seen how the presence of
Denisovan DNA on both sides of the Timor Straits and both east and west of
the Wallace Line confirms that migrations across stretches of open water up
to 90 kilometers wide were indeed taking place at least 60,000 years ago—a
position already supported by a mass of other evidence.8
Likewise, and significantly earlier, bones and artifacts of Homo erectus
dated to 800,000 years before the present have been found on the Indonesian
islands of Flores and Timor, again making open-water crossings by these
supposed “subhumans” a certainty even during periods of lowered sea level.9
All of this has long ago been conceded. Despite the passage of close to a
million years since Homo erectus first sailed to Flores, however, what
archaeology does not concede is that the human species could have
developed and refined those early nautical skills to the extent of being able to
cross a vast ocean like the Pacific or the Atlantic from one side to the other.
In the case of the former, extensive transoceanic journeys are not believed to
have been undertaken until about 3,500 years ago, during the so-called
Polynesian expansion.10 And the mainstream historical view is that the
Atlantic was not successfully navigated until 1492—the year in which, as the
schoolyard mnemonic has it, “Columbus sailed the ocean blue.”
Indeed, the notion that long transoceanic voyages were a technological
impossibility during the Stone Age remains one of the central structural
elements of the dominant reference frame of archaeology 11—a reference
frame that geneticists see no reason not to respect and deploy when
interpreting their own data. Since that reference frame rules out, a priori, the
option of a direct ocean crossing between Australasia and South America
during the Paleolithic and instead is adamant that all settlement came via
northeast Asia, geneticists tend to approach the data from that perspective.
This is the case with Raghavan and Willerslev. First, as we’ve seen, they
concede the presence within the data of “a distant Old-World signal related to
Australo-Melanesians and East Asians in some Native Americans.”12 But,
second, they go on to downplay the implications of this with the following
interpretation:
The widely scattered and differential affinity of Native Americans to the Australo-Melanesians, ranging from a strong signal in the Surui to a much weaker signal in
northern Amerindians such as Ojibwa, points to this gene flow occurring after the
initial peopling by Native American ancestors.13
Here’s how they arrive at this interpretation of the data:
1. They trace the source of the strong Australasian signal in the Amazon to “gene flow”—the transfer of genetic variation from one population
to another.14
2. They propose that this gene flow reached Amazonian peoples such as
the Surui from northern Amerindian populations such as the Aleutian
Islanders and the Athabascans, and they appear to favor particularly a
“route via the Aleutian Islanders,” since the latter “were previously
found to be closely related to the Inuit who have a relatively greater
affinity to East Asians, Oceanians, and Denisovans than Native
Americans.”15 They hypothesize that the “complex genetic history” of
the Aleutian Islanders perhaps “included input from a population
related to Australo-Melanesians through an East Asian continental
route [i.e., from Siberia across the Bering land bridge], and this
genomic signal might have been subsequently transferred to parts of
the Americas, including South America, through past gene flow
events.”16
The problem I have with all this is that these hypothetical “past gene flow
events” somehow left a strong DNA signal in the Amazon, one of the
remotest and most inaccessible parts of South America, while leaving next to
no signal at all in North America, which—whether the genes were carried by
people who traveled on foot or by people who island-hopped and coasted
from the Aleutians in simple watercraft—would surely have involved
interactions with North American populations before any interactions with
South American populations took place—and therefore presumably should
have left a DNA signal in North America at least as strong as the signal found
in the Amazon.
Seeking clarification, I contacted Professor Willerslev directly at the
University of Copenhagen on March 2, 2018, and asked what in his data had
led him and his coauthors to conclude that the gene flow bringing the
Australasian signal to the Amazon had occurred after the initial peopling of
the Americas. I also asked why they favored Aleutian islanders as the likely
vector and whether it was not counterintuitive to propose such an extreme
northern source for this gene flow. If a northern source had indeed been
involved, I argued, then:
wouldn’t we expect to see a cline in the signal from strongest in the north, nearest
the putative source, to weakest in the faraway south and particularly in remote
South American regions like the Amazon? But my understanding of the data is
that if there is a cline at all it is in the opposite direction—i.e., from strongest in
the south to weakest in the north. Am I understanding correctly and if so how do
you explain this counterintuitive cline? Are we to imagine Aleutians or
Athabascans island-hopping and coasting down the entire Pacific coast of North
America, absolutely not intermingling with anyone else or leaving any DNA traces
along the way, until they arrive (presumably) at some point on the Pacific coast of
South America whence they strike inland for the Amazon?17
Professor Willerslev replied:
When you talk about a cline in contemporary data you assume peoples have stayed
in the same place since the Pleistocene. We do not know that. Therefore I don’t
think it’s a particularly good argument. A lot of stuff can happen over tens of
thousands of years in regard to distribution of peoples. In principle the signature in
the north could have been lost by replacement. We simply don’t know.18
“Dear Eske,” I responded (happily we had agreed to switch to first-name
terms):
I take your point, absolutely, on all of this. And I certainly don’t imagine that
peoples have stayed in the same places since the Ice Age. It’s part of the essence of
being human, I think, to move around, migrate, and explore. Still, will I be
misrepresenting the facts if I were to state in my book, with reference specifically
to present-day populations, that a cline of the Australasian signal is evident with
a stronger signal in South America, particularly the Amazon, than anywhere in
North America? And further, again with reference specifically to present-day
populations, would I be misrepresenting the facts to say that the Australasian
signal is stronger amongst the Surui than it is amongst the Aleutians and
Athabascans and that the Surui’s affinity to East Asians, Oceanians, and
Denisovans is stronger than that of the Inuit?19
“No!” Eske replied, “I would not call it a cline.20… It’s strongest in the
Surui but stronger in Aleutians than in Athabascans … but these groups also
contain more East Asian so it may simply reflect just that. The Denisovan
signal is not stronger in the Surui than in the others (to my knowledge).”21
In summary, therefore, taking into account all of the above, the situation
seems to be that the Denisovan signal remains at a constant and fairly low
level throughout present-day indigenous populations so far sequenced in both North and South America.22 The Australasian signal, by contrast, is definitely
and notably much stronger among populations in the Amazon, such as the
Surui, and much weaker among other Native Americans such as the Arhuaco
(of non-Amazonian northern Colombia), the Wayuu (of non-Amazonian
northern Venezuela), the Purepecha (of Mexico), and the Ojibwa, Cree, and
Algonquin of north and northeast North America. While never reaching the
high levels found among Amazonian populations, the signal among Aleutian
Islanders and Athabascans is relatively stronger than in other Native North
American groups and relatively stronger in Aleutian Islanders than it is in
Athabascans—though Raghavan and Willerslev warn in their Science paper
that the Aleutian Islander data must be interpreted with some caution since it
“is heavily masked owing to recent admixture with Europeans.”23
“THE MOST PARSIMONIOUS
SOLUTION …”
I NEXT REMINDED ESKE OF Skoglund and Reich’s papers. In these, as the reader
will recall, the authors contemplate the “formal possibility”24 that the
Australasian signal might reflect direct settlement in the Amazon by an
Australasian-related population “that would thus have penetrated deep inside
the Americas without mixing with the main ancestral lineage of present-day
Native Americans.”25 My question to Professor Willerslev, therefore, was
whether there was anything in the genetic data that he was aware of that
would effectively refute the notion of direct settlement.
His reply got straight to the point:
Currently no one has a good explanation of the Australo-Melanesian signal. All
that is put forward as possible explanations are purely speculative. So whether it’s
an old or a later event is unknown. What we do know is that it’s present in some
Native American groups particularly from Brazil. We also know it has to be preColumbian. We also know that it’s not present in any of the ancient skeletons
genome sequenced so far. Possible explanations can be: 1) It comes in after the
initial peopling of the Americas e.g. by costal migrations that do not leave much
trace behind in contemporary populations (e.g. they move quickly), or that we just
haven’t sequenced the populations in North America that hold the signal; 2) it’s an
old migration through Beringia before Native Americans but then it’s strange they
leave no signals in the ancient skeletons sequenced so far; 3) it’s a structured
138
initial Native American population moving south into the Americas of which some
carry the signal but again then it’s strange that there is no evidence of admixture
between the two groups; 4) someone holding this signal comes into the Americas
not through Beringia but crossing into South America across the Ocean. Based
purely on the genetic data this is the most parsimonious explanation but it does not
make practical sense; 5) Finally it’s a possibility that the signal is a methodical
artefact. That the methods are not behaving as we think they should do.26
Apart from point 5, which is above my pay grade to assess, it was
refreshing to encounter such a straightforward admission that no good
explanation has yet been offered for the Australo-Melanesian signal, and such
willingness to consider a wide range of possibilities. Since I was already
leaning toward the view that the signal is mysterious and might bear witness
to a crossing of the Pacific Ocean followed by the settlement in the Amazon
of a relatively small group, my eyes were naturally drawn to Eske’s point 4.
“Based purely on the genetic data,” and invoking the parsimony principle
(whereby the simplest scientific explanation that fits the evidence is
preferred), it looked very much as if this leading figure in the study of ancient
genetics agreed with me! Where he and I parted company, however, was over
the possibility that anybody could have made an oceanic crossing of
thousands of kilometers during the Stone Age. For Eske such a proposition
simply didn’t make practical sense.
I sent him a follow-up mail to ask if he based this conclusion “on the
archaeological consensus that our Upper Palaeolithic and early Holocene
ancestors were incapable of undertaking long trans-oceanic voyages?”27
He replied, “In regard to crossing the Pacific. I’m not saying it did not
happen but there is no evidence suggesting that humans were capable of such
a journey until quite late in history (Polynesian expansion). It’s a possibility
and I’m open to the idea but there’s not much evidence supporting it except
going for the most parsimonious solution of the genetic data.”28
So here again is a refreshing openness of mind so rarely seen among
archaeologists. The best fit for the genetic data does indeed appear to be a
transpacific voyage (or voyages) to South America by a group (or groups) of
settlers carrying Australo-Melanesian genes. However, on the matter of the
practicality of anyone undertaking transpacific voyages in the Stone Age,
which has to do primarily with the level of technology attributed to our
ancestors at that time, Professor Willerslev accepts, and builds into his own reasoning, the mainstream archaeological consensus that “there is no
evidence suggesting that humans were capable of such a journey until quite
late in history.”
He is not to be blamed for doing so, since it is normal in the sciences for an
expert in one field to trust and rely upon the conclusions of experts in other
fields. Quite possibly Professor Willerslev is not aware—why should he be?
—of how little like a science archaeology really is and how often the
mainstream archaeological consensus has proved, after suppressing
dissenting opinions for decades, to have been fundamentally wrong all along.
Recent examples include the hasty and forced addition of more than 5,000
years to the previously accepted chronology for the earliest megalithic sites
after the discovery of 11,600-year-old Gobekli Tepe in Turkey,29 the collapse
of “Clovis First,” and the comprehensive debunking of the long-held belief
that the Neanderthals were incapable of art.30 Clearly, the mainstream
archaeological consensus is not always right in what it agrees upon and it
may well turn out that it is not right on the matter of grand oceanic voyages
during the Ice Age. Indeed, rather than being ruled out on the basis of a priori
assumptions, perhaps that strange Australo-Melanesian genetic signal in the
Amazon is part of the proof that such voyages must indeed have occurred.
Then there’s the matter of the role of the Denisovans in all this. We know
from the evidence of Denisova Cave itself that their technology—while
undoubtedly “Stone Age”—was far ahead of its time and in some ways much
more akin to the Neolithic than to the Upper Paleolithic. We know that they
could make sea crossings and that they ranged over a vast area, at least from
the Altai Mountains in the west to Australo-Melanesia in the east. Last but
not least, we know that their DNA survives most strongly today in people of
Australo-Melanesian descent, and there’s informed speculation that Australo-Melanesia may have been their original homeland.
It’s strange, and evocative, that the mystery of the Denisovans and the
mystery of the Australo-Melanesian genetic signal in the Amazon should
collide in this way, and all the more so because, as Eske Willerslev makes
clear, there’s no especially strong Denisovan element in the signal. Perhaps
further research will provide us with a higher-resolution picture, but from the
data presently in hand it looks like the gene flow to the Amazon involved a
population of Australo-Melanesians who had undergone little or no mixing with Denisovans. For such a people to have existed in the very area where the
genetic evidence suggests the Denisovans were most strongly congregated is
itself somewhat mysterious and suggests some kind of selective process at
work.
In previous books, in particular Fingerprints of the Gods and Underworld,
I have given extensive consideration to the intriguing phenomenon of ancient
maps that show the world as it looked during the last Ice Age and do so,
moreover, with stunning longitudinal and latitudinal accuracy and with the
use of complex spherical trigonometry. Though it would be superfluous to
reproduce here evidence that I have already presented in such detail
elsewhere, I include an appendix—appendix 2—that gives some indication of
the richness and the significance of this overlooked material.
However many times by however many hands they have been copied and
recopied down the ages, it is my contention that these anomalous maps can
be traced back to lost source documents that could only have originated with
a civilization at least advanced enough to have explored the world, and to
have mapped and measured it, when it was still in the grip of the Ice Age. A
civilization capable of such feats must, at the very least, have had its own
adepts in the techniques of boat-building, sailing, navigating, cartography,
and geometry—none of these being among the skills that archaeologists are
normally willing to attribute to Ice Age hunter-gatherers.
It is not inconceivable, however, if such a hypothetical civilization had
existed, that it might have sponsored “outreach programs” to the hunter gatherers who also lived in the world at that time, just as our own twenty first-century technological civilization has “outreach programs” to hunter gatherer tribes in the Amazon rainforest, the jungles of New Guinea, and the
Namibian desert today—anthropologists, aid workers, resettlement experts,
and so on and so forth. It’s even conceivable that a hypothetical lost
civilization of the Ice Age could have had “resettlement experts” of its own
who were interested in the outcomes that might follow from physically
removing people from one area—such as Melanesia, for example—and
resettling them in far-off places like South America. If a global cataclysm
were to loom, threatening the annihilation of the civilization, such “outreach”
initiatives might even have been accelerated to prepare hunter-gatherer
populations to serve as refuges for the survivors.
This is all pure speculation, of course, but at least it’s in good company. As
141
Eske concedes, all of the explanations—including his own—that have so far
been offered to account for the presence of Australasian DNA in the Amazon
are “purely speculative.”
And the mystery continues to deepen. In November 2018, two major new
studies were published, one in the journal Cell, coauthored by Cosimo Posth,
David Reich, and others, and the second in Science, coauthored by Eske
Willerslev, J. Victor Moreno-Mayar, David Meltzer, and others.31 These new
studies found Australasian DNA already present in skeletal remains from
Lagoa Santa, Brazil, dated to 10,400 years ago, and confirmed the suspicion
of the researchers that the anomalous genetic signal must have reached South
America in the “Late Pleistocene”32—that is, near the end of the last Ice Age.
“How did it get there?” wonders geneticist J. Victor Moreno-Mayar,
immediately answering his own question as follows: “We have no idea.”
Similarly, David J. Meltzer expressed amazement at the most peculiar
character of the signal, so clearly present in South America yet “somehow
leaping over all North America in a single bound.”33
For the purposes of my own quest, however, that anomalous, unexplained
signal had the effect of opening up a new and fruitful avenue of inquiry. With
the archetypally North American Clovis culture now known to have South
American genetic roots, it was becoming increasingly obvious that to explore
the mysteries of one half of the megacontinent I could not be oblivious to
what had happened in the other half.
My focus would remain on North America, to which we’ll return in part 5,
but I had a strong intuition that I might miss an important piece of the puzzle
if I failed to investigate the Amazon first.
I resented the intuition, which felt like a diversion, but it was so insistent
that ultimately I could not ignore it.
Part 4
The Amazon Mystery
11
GHOST CITIES OF THE AMAZON
IN MY QUEST FOR THE traces of a lost civilization of prehistoric antiquity, the
Amazon rainforest at first seemed to have little to offer. Without that teasing,
tantalizing Australasian DNA signal I probably wouldn’t have given it a
second thought. But the signal was there, it was real, it was hugely
anomalous, and it cried out for a deeper inquiry.
Along with much of the rest of the Americas, the Amazon entered
European consciousness in the sixteenth century—the century of conquest. It
was not a primary target. Mexico and Peru were hit first, their armies
conquered, their wealth pillaged. Then rumors began to circulate of exotic
civilizations rich in gold hidden in the jungles beyond the Andes Mountains.
The greed of the Spaniards was aroused and in February 1541 Francisco de
Orellana and Gonzalo Pizarro (the latter the brother of Francisco Pizarro, the
conqueror of Peru) struck east from the city of Quito in Ecuador on a journey
into the unknown.
Their mission was nothing less than to find the fabled El Dorado in the
remote interior of South America and to loot the vast wealth they expected to
find piled up there. In this they failed but in the grander scheme of things
they succeeded mightily, for their expedition left us with the earliest
surviving eyewitness account of the Amazon—unfortunately not of the pre Columbian Amazon, which would have been ideal, but of the Amazon so
soon after contact that it remained, effectively, in its pre-Columbian state. As
such, it has much to tell us about the lost prehistory of the Americas.
At the head of a force of more than 200 Spanish soldiers, Orellana and
Pizarro descended from the Andes. Hacking their way through increasingly
dense and difficult jungle and fighting multiple engagements with hostile
tribes, they eventually reached the banks of the Coca River, a tributary of the
Napo River that is, in turn, an important tributary of the great and majestic
Amazon itself. The terrain made further overland travel almost impossible
and, far from finding and reveling in the supposedly limitless riches of El
Dorado, the conquistadors were by now depleted by illness and weak with
hunger. Their solution was to build a fair-sized boat, which they named the
San Pedro. In it, on Pizarro’s orders, Orellana then embarked with a force of
50 men to seek out and raid local villages for food.
The agreement was that Orellana would return within 12 days with
whatever supplies he could gather. Unfortunately, however, the Amazon
River system hadn’t been consulted when the plan was made, and the San
Pedro was swept downstream at such a rate that very soon it was hundreds of
miles away and the prospect of a return against the powerful currents was
most uninviting. Besides, even if Orellana’s force had been able to row the
rough-and-ready craft upstream again there was no guarantee that they would
ever find their way back to Pizarro through the maze of braided river
channels in which one opening looked very much like the next.
They decided, therefore, to press on and, in the process, became the first
Europeans ever to navigate the entire length of the Amazon River and to
cross the full width of South America from west to east. This was barely 20
years after the Spanish brought smallpox to the “New World”—another first!
—and the great pandemics that were to depopulate the Americas had not yet
penetrated deeply (if at all) into the remote fastness of the Amazon jungle.
The pale horse of death would very soon follow, but Orellana’s adventure
took place at just about the last time that the cultures and civilizations that
had thrived and prospered in the rainforest for thousands of years could ever
be seen in something approaching their original form and context.
For that reason we are fortunate that Orellana and his murderous gang of
mercenaries—often starving, often having to fight for their lives—were
accompanied on this desperate voyage by Brother Gaspar de Carvajal, a
literate and sensitive Dominican friar who kept a journal throughout. In it he
describes himself as “a man to whom God chose to give a part in such a strange and hitherto never experienced voyage of discovery, such as this one
which I shall relate from here on.”1
The expeditionaries frequently faced extreme privations. On one occasion,
for example, Carvajal reports that after many days without food,
we were eating nothing but leather, belts and soles of shoes, cooked with certain
herbs, with the result that so great was our weakness that we could not remain
standing, for some on all fours and others with staffs went into the woods to search
for a few roots to eat and some there were who ate certain herbs with which they
were not familiar, and they were at the point of death, because they were like mad
men and did not possess sense; but as Our Lord was pleased that we should
continue our journey, no-one died.2
Whether by divine intervention or by good luck, or because of Orellana’s
effective leadership, none of his tough and resourceful men died of starvation
on the voyage, and only a handful lost their lives due to infections, disease,
and battle wounds. It was, all in all, a 7,000-kilometer journey, the whole of
which, from departure from Quito in February 1541 to arrival at Marajo
Island in the Amazon estuary on the Atlantic coast of Brazil in August 1542,
took 18 months.
More important by far than his descriptions of the risks and dangers of the
adventure, the great historical significance of Carvajal’s journal is the
shockingly counterintuitive picture it paints of a vast and complex Amazon.
Certainly there were regions of complete wilderness where the
expeditionaries suffered badly—hundreds of kilometers of deserted
riverbanks with no people, no crops, and apparently no wildlife. But we
discover as we read on that these empty quarters were interspersed with
regions of astonishing, heavily populated abundance, where “great cities”
more than 20 kilometers from end-to-end, roughly the length of Manhattan,
lined the riverbanks.3
Here Carvajal reports that enormous expanses were
given over to productive agriculture 4
and there were signs everywhere of
large and well-organized political and economic systems linked to centralized
states that were capable of fielding disciplined armies thousands strong.5
These last glimpses of the Amazon before the ruination of European
contact hint at a glorious, sophisticated, and technologically advanced
indigenous prehistory. Carvajal tells of one stretch of the mighty river, 80
leagues—possibly more than 500 kilometers 6—in length, ruled by a “great overlord named Machiparo.” Throughout his territories a single language was
spoken and the towns and villages stood so close together that there was
usually not more than “a crossbow shot” between them.7
A week later the Spaniards came to a “fortified village” and, finding
themselves short of food they took it by storm, killing some of the inhabitants
and forcing the remainder to flee into the jungle. They then “remained
resting, regaling ourselves with good lodgings, eating all we wanted, for three
days in this village. There were many roads here that entered into the interior
of the land, very fine highways.”8
Orellana took these latter as an ominous sign—the locals they had driven
out of their homes might easily return with reinforcements—and the
expedition sailed on, enjoying the abundant and varied foods that they now
found everywhere on their route downriver.9
The next major halt was at “a village that was on a high bank, and as it
appeared small to us the Captain ordered us to capture it, and also because it
looked so nice that it seemed as if it might be the recreation spot of some
overlord of the inland.”10
The residents put up a tough fight but were eventually expelled:
And we were masters of the village, where we found very great quantities of food
of which we laid in a supply. In this village there was a villa in which there was a
great deal of porcelain-ware of various makes, both jars and pitchers, very large,
with a capacity of more than twenty-five arrobas [one hundred gallons], and other
small pieces such as plates and bowls and candelabra of this porcelain of the best
that has ever been seen in the world, for that of Malaga is not its equal, because
this porcelain which we found, is all glazed and embellished with all colors, and so
bright are these colors that they astonish, and, more than this, the drawings and
paintings which they make on them are so accurately worked out that one wonders
how with only natural skill they manufacture and decorate all these things making
them look just like Roman articles; and here the Indians told us that as much as
there was made out of clay in this house, so much there was back in the country in
gold and silver.11
From this village, as from others through which they had passed, “there
went out many roads and fine highways to the inland country.”12 Orellena
had previously resisted the impulse to explore these enticing jungle
thoroughfares but now, wishing to find out where they led to—perhaps even to El Dorado itself!—he took several companions with him and set out. Once
again, however, discretion got the better of valor:
He had not gone half a league when the roads became more like royal highways
and wider and when the Captain had perceived this, he decided to turn back,
because he saw that it was not prudent to go on any further.13
No doubt Orellana’s prudence was among the reasons that so many of his
men survived the perilous 7,000-kilometer voyage from the Andes to the
Atlantic, but it is a matter of profound regret that he did not explore those
“royal highways” through the jungle. In consequence, today we may only
imagine where—and what—they led to.
UNPALATABLE TRUTHS
ALTHOUGH WIDELY DISCUSSED AT THE time, Carvajal’s journal, the first
eyewitness account of the full length of the Amazon in a near-pristine state,
subsequently disappeared from public view for more than 300 years.14 It only
resurfaced in the nineteenth century following an exhaustive archival search
by the Chilean scholar José Toribio Medina, who published it in 1895.15
Still it seemed that forces were at work to sideline Carvajal’s uniquely
important contribution to our understanding of the ancient Amazon. No
sooner was the journal in print, at any rate, than it began to be “debunked” by
scholars.16
For example, there were strident objections to a claim made at one point in
Carvajal’s account that statuesque female archers, whom the friar
unhesitatingly calls “Amazons” after the warrior women of classical Greek
myth,17 had participated in an attack on Orellana’s expeditionaries.18
Carvajal also states that many of the other peoples they met on the journey
were “subjects of the Amazons” whose dominions were extensive and whose
sumptuous capital city had five enormous temples at its heart:19
In these buildings they had many gold and silver idols in the form of women, and
many vessels of gold and silver for the service of the Sun.20
Such descriptions enjoyed wide currency and inflamed the public
imagination in the years following the voyage.21 As a result, the great river
system Orellana explored is not today named after him, or some other
Spanish adventurer, but called the “Amazon” instead.22 To the skeptics of a
later age, however, the link to the classical world that Carvajal suggested, and
the notion of a lavish city in the depths of the jungle, seemed ridiculous.
Nor was this all.
What really stuck in the skeptical craw were the accounts Carvajal gave of
the inhabitants of the rainforest, of the general level of their civilization, of
the refinement of their arts and crafts, and particularly of the extent of their
settlements—not only the fabulous capital of the Amazons but also other
“very large cities,” including some that “glistened in white.”23 By the 1890s
the view had already set in among anthropologists and archaeologists that the
Americas as a whole had only been peopled relatively recently—and it was
strongly believed that one of the very last places to be settled, in this
generally very late migration scenario, would have been the Amazon. As this
view tightened its grip in subsequent decades, it began to seem obvious to all
serious-minded researchers—so obvious as to be beyond question—that the
Amazon could only been have been inhabited for about 1,000 years, and then
only by very small groups of hunter-gatherers since the jungle was “resource poor.”24 Indeed in this same vein, even as late as the 1990s, the rainforest
was still being depicted by environmentalists as “a counterfeit paradise
whose lush vegetation hid nutrient-poor soils incapable of supporting large
populations and complex societies.”25
The reason Carvajal’s account was disbelieved for most of the twentieth
century by almost everyone who reviewed it is therefore plain to see. The
picture he painted of the pre-contact state of the peoples and cultures of the
Amazon flew in the face of a dominant (and domineering) scholarly theory.
Predictably, therefore, the first reaction of most archaeologists was not to
question the theory in the light of the rediscovery, after long neglect, of an
on-the-spot, eyewitness account. Instead they chose to defend the theory and
undermine Carvajal by accusing him of lying in order to glorify the
achievements of the expedition.
The friar gives us his word—no small matter for such a man—that he
wrote only “the truth throughout.”26 But his accounts of cities, huge
149
populations, advanced ceramics (“surpassing those of Malaga”), and
enormous, fertile agricultural lands along the course of the Amazon were too
subversive to be accepted. Quite simply, if he was right about all this, then
the modern “experts” were wrong—and that could not be tolerated.
Indeed the judgment that Carvajal was a fantasist and a liar, and that
nothing he had said about the Amazon could be taken seriously, seemed
about to be set in stone when the first shreds of the evidence that would
ultimately exonerate him, proving that he had indeed told the truth
throughout, began to emerge.
DID AMAZONIAN CITIES EXIST?
PROFESSOR DAVID WILKINSON OF UCLA, an authority on long-term and large scale phenomena in world politics, including empires and systems of
independent states, has made a special study of the level of civilization in the
Amazon prior to European contact.
The key question for civilizationism is: were there Amazonian cities before
European contact? “Civilizations” require “cities,” and “cities” are the defining
feature of “civilizations.” And by “cities,” we mean 4th magnitude settlements, i.e.
settlements with a population of not less than the order of 10^4 (~10,000) … Did
Amazonian cities exist?27
Judging from the earliest reports of Spanish and Portuguese expeditions,
says Wilkinson, “the answer would certainly have to be in the affirmative.”28
He draws particular attention to one of the cities, mentioned earlier, that
extended for more than 20 kilometers from end to end,29 and to another
settlement that Carvajal describes as “more than two leagues long.”30 The
exact length of a league, Wilkinson notes, was “not a fully agreed-upon or
stabilized physical distance, but was probably not less than 2.5 English
statute miles nor more than 4.”31 A settlement of close-packed housing
covering 2 leagues would therefore have been between 5 miles (8 kilometers)
and 8 miles (13 kilometers) in extent. Here Wilkinson refers us to a study by
an international team of anthropologists and geologists who focused on what
is known about this settlement and calculated that it would have housed
150
“perhaps 10,000 inhabitants.”32 As Wilkinson notes, this therefore makes it,
by definition, a fourth-magnitude settlement—that is, a city, and “hence part
of a civilization.”33 It follows that the larger settlement, with an extent of
more than 20 kilometers, would likely have had at least twice as many
inhabitants, that is, 20,000 or more.
It is instructive to compare these figures with those of “civilized” Europe
in a similar time frame.34 Certainly London, with a population estimated at
60,000 in the sixteenth century,35 was larger than either of the two
Amazonian cities we are considering here, but the difference was one of
degree, not of kind. The British city of York, an established urban center
since Roman times, had a population estimated at between 10,000 to 12,000
in the sixteenth century 36—very much on the same scale as the Amazonian
cities—while in Spain, Toledo did not achieve a population of 13,000 until
the mid-nineteenth century.37
On Carvajal’s account, therefore, not only did the Amazon have cities but
its cities were comparable in size to those of Europe at the same time. He also
reports that the chieftain Machiparo ruled over “many settlements and very
large ones which together contribute for fighting purposes fifty thousand men
of the age of from thirty years up to seventy, because the young men do not
go to war.” Aside from the interesting anthropological observation about the
age at which men in sixteenth-century Amazonian society went to war, this
statement has important implications for our understanding of the population
of the region. Machiparo’s domain was just one among many through which
the Orellana expedition passed, yet if Carvajal reported correctly it could
muster an army 50,000 strong. This is a greater number than Denmark and
Norway combined, or Sweden and Finland combined, or Brandenburg Prussia, or even the Tsardom of Russia, could field in the same period.38
A view of the Amazon as an “uncivilized” and “savage” place—indeed as
the very epitome of savagery—has been deeply ingrained in the European
psyche for centuries. It is therefore not surprising the Carvajal was
disbelieved when his journal finally surfaced in 1895. Also disbelieved were
the reports of the two similar adventures that followed—the Ursua
expedition, which took place 20 years after Orellana’s voyage, and the
Teixeira expedition of 1637–38.
There was no official recorder for the Ursua expedition, but one of its
officers, a certain Captain Altamirano, provides independent confirmation of
Carvajal’s observations when he speaks of settlements with populations of
around 10,000 in the heart of the Amazon jungle—at the lower end of the
urban scale, but again, as Professor David Wilkinson notes, “city-sized.”39
By the time of the Teixeira expedition the region had been riven by
smallpox epidemics that caused depopulation across wide areas, and had also
begun to suffer other negative effects of European penetration and
exploitation. Nonetheless the expedition’s Jesuit priest, Father Cristóbal de
Acuña, who, like Carvajal, kept a journal, could report that “the river of
Amazons waters more extensive regions, fertilizes more plains, supports
more people, and augments by its floods a mightier ocean” than the Ganges,
Euphrates, or Nile. Like Carvajal and Altamirano before him, Acuña, too,
was still able to speak of an “infinity of Indians” and of inhabited areas
hundreds of kilometers in extent where the settlements were packed “so close
together, that one is scarcely lost sight of when another comes in view.”40
“These testimonials,” Wilkinson writes, “would seem sufficient. With
eyewitnesses reporting the size of settlements and the wealth of surplus food
available to support dense populations (and social complexity), there could
be, and apparently there was indeed, pre-Columbian civilization in the
Amazon basin.”41
The problem, however, as Wilkinson immediately concedes, is that
“serious doubts later arose.”42
The first element of doubt had to do with the accounts of subsequent
penetrations of Amazonia—after the Orellana, Ursua, and Teixeira
expeditions. In this regard the observations of Padre Samuel Fritz, a Jesuit
preacher, are of particular significance.43 He lived among the Omaguas,
through whose domains along the banks of the Rio Napo, between the Coca
and Aguarico, the Orellana expedition passed and which Carvajal (although
he does not refer to the Omagua by name) describes as densely populated.44
Not so according to Padre Fritz! Between 1686 and 1715 he established
thirty-eight Jesuit missions among the Omagua and noted on a map that the
important settlements among which he had planted these missions had a
combined total population of just 26,000 people 45—quite a different matter
from the hundreds of thousands reported by Carvajal. Let us note in passing —for there is a hint here of what was really going on—that Fritz’s main
preoccupation, other than preaching, was to advise “these small weak village
communities on how to retreat and regroup upriver to evade continual
Portuguese slave-raiding.”46
Likewise, a little later—between 1743 and 1744—the French geographer
Charles-Marie de la Condamine traveled through the region and reported no
cities or armies in Amazonia, again in stark contrast to Orellana. For
Condamine, the Omaguas were “a people formerly powerful” while along the
entire river system he found “no warlike tribes inimical to Europeans, all
such having either submitted or withdrawn themselves to the interior.”47
These reports, and many others like them as the eighteenth century merged
into the nineteenth and the nineteenth into the twentieth, did serious damage
to the credibility of the earlier explorers—to such an extent that Smithsonian
Institution archaeologist Betty Meggers was still insisting, before she passed
away in 2012, that Carvajal had either misunderstood everything he saw or,
more likely, that his entire account was riddled with fantasy and invention.48
THE LONG SHADOW
OF BETTY MEGGERS
THROUGHOUT HER WORKING LIFE MEGGERS was a passionate advocate of the
view that no pre-Columbian Amazonian settlement could ever have
supported even 1,000 people, let alone several thousands or even tens of
thousands as Carvajal had reported. It was likewise her opinion that the level
of sophistication Carvajal had described—the armies, the food storage, the
porcelain specialists, and so on—was in fact completely impossible given the
limitations of the Amazonian environment.49
Meggers’s Amazonia: Man and Culture in a Counterfeit Paradise,
published in 1971 (but expanding on work she had done and conclusions she
had reached in the 1950s), has been described as possibly “the most
influential book ever written about the Amazon.”50 And indeed, it was this
book, and the “environmental limitation” movement that it spawned—
because many other archaeologists, anthropologists, and ecologists simply
followed Meggers without question—that for a long while served as the sole
153
acceptable reference frame through which the prehistory of the Amazon
would be understood. As Professor Wilkinson puts it, “the meticulously
careful and systematic researches of 20th century cultural-ecologist
archaeologists” like Meggers created a consensus that “large-scale
settlements and societies” could never have existed in what the
environmental limitationists saw as the “wet-desert” of Amazonia.51
But as was the case with Vance Haynes and the mistaken Clovis First
doctrine that kept so many locked in illusion for so long, so it was with the
ideas of Meggers and her followers. A dominant individual, with a
prestigious position, can delay the progress of knowledge for decades but
ultimately cannot stop the buildup of contrary evidence and opinions that will
lead to a new paradigm.
Predictably, therefore, as Wilkinson goes on to note in his study of
Amazonian civilization:
Towards the end of the 20th century, the archaeological pendulum began to swing
back toward crediting the early explorers’ accounts. Even Meggers [in Amazonia:
Man and Culture in a Counterfeit Paradise] had passed on without comment a
report [dated approximately 1662] by Mauricio de Heriarte that the capital of the
Tapajós (at today’s Santarem) could field 60,000 warriors. Any such number of
militia would by … comparative-civilizational standards have implied an urban
population of 300,000 to 360,000!52
It is troubling, in retrospect, that Meggers knew of, yet did not consider,
the implications of Heriarte’s report—but, of course, had she done so, she
would have been obliged to rethink her whole thesis. Within twenty years
after the publication of Counterfeit Paradise, however, other scholars were
actively doing the rethinking for her. Notable among them was Anna
Curtenius Roosevelt, now professor of anthropology at the University of
Illinois at Chicago. In 1993 she presented evidence that some pre-Columbian
Amazonian settlements “held many thousands of people … from several
thousands, to tens of thousands of individuals or more.” And in 1999 she
wrote, “In Amazonia, non-state societies appear to have organized large,
dense populations, intensive subsistence adaptations, large systems of
earthworks, production of elaborate artworks and architecture for
considerable periods of time.”53
Likewise, in 1994, anthropologist Neil Whitehead concluded of the
prehistoric Amazon, “We are dealing with civilizations of considerable
complexity, perhaps even protostates.”54 And in 2001, Michael
Heckenberger, James Petersen, and Eduardo Neves, facing criticism from
Meggers, strongly defended their own by then well-established position that
“there were past Amazonian societies significantly larger than anything
reported in the past 100–200 years,”55 that these societies included
“chiefdoms” or “kingdoms,”56 and that “lost civilizations” were indeed
present in some parts of the Amazon before European contact.57
What are we to make of all this to-ing and fro-ing?
In summary, “to address the contradictions in the sources and among the
authorities,” Wilkinson asks, “If there were Amazonian cities, where did they
go? And, if there were Amazonian cities, how could they have subsisted?”58
He gives two two-word answers to these questions—“recurrent
catastrophes” to the first and “exemplary agronomy” to the second.
EXTINCTION AND AMNESIA
WE’LL COME TO THE EXEMPLARY agronomy in a later chapter, but let’s deal with
the recurrent catastrophes now.
Prior to the Orellana expedition, smallpox may already have found its way
to the Amazon overland from Mexico where it had been introduced during
the Spanish conquest a few decades earlier.59 If not, then the direct
transmission of the disease to Peru in 1532–33 by Pizarro’s conquistadors
certainly brought it into the Andes Mountains in force, making it only a
matter of time before it descended to the east side of the range and
thoroughly infiltrated the rainforest.60 Quite possibly, although there is no
proof, the Orellana expedition may itself have been the first principal vector
that carried the scourge into the heart of the Amazon but if so it was certainly
not the last—nor was smallpox the only Old World disease to which
Europeans possessed significant immunity while Native Americans did not.
Measles, influenza, and other viruses also took a ghastly toll.
Wilkinson cites an important study by anthropologist Thomas P. Myers
that documents “more than 30 epidemics—smallpox, measles, and other
outbreaks—some ‘on a massive scale’—in 16th–18th century South
America.”61 Myers finds evidence of “very substantial depopulation between
the Orellana and Teixeira expeditions” and estimates that in many areas it ran
as high 99 percent.62 This, he further suggests, “may have been the reason
why the missionaries later transmitted the idea of a relatively uninhabited
Amazon region. The people they found were the survivors of the diseases and
epidemics.”63
The implications of the virtual extinction of the Amazon’s pre-Columbian
population are immense. If so many died, then we can be sure that much else
died with them. As Wilkinson succinctly phrases it, “A small city of 10,000
that loses 99% of its inhabitants becomes a village of 100, that can do far
less.”64
Likewise, by extension, we can imagine what would have happened if that
city were just a small part of a great and complex civilization of the Amazon
and if that entire civilization were deprived of 99 percent of its warriors, 99
percent of its farmers, 99 percent of its hunters and gatherers, 99 percent of
its astronomers, 99 percent of its healers and shamans, 99 percent of its
architects, 99 percent of its boat builders, and 99 percent of its wisdom
keepers. Of course, across the scale of the whole Amazon basin, this would
not have happened overnight; likely it would have extended over a century or
two—a creeping cataclysm rather than a single big hit. But the end result,
whether it came slow or fast, would have been the same. Once left deserted,
the great cities and monuments and other public works of any hypothetical
Amazonian civilization would quickly have been encroached upon and soon
completely hidden by the jungle while, at the same time, cultural memory
banks would have been wiped almost clean and vast resources of skills,
knowledge, and potential would have been lost forever.
Little wonder, then, that to this day amnesia, confusion, contradictions, and
mystery confound the search for the truth of the Amazon’s deep past.
12
THE ANCIENTS
BEHIND THE VEIL
THE DNA EVIDENCE PRESENTED IN part 3 reveals an astonishing anomaly. At
some point during the Ice Age, perhaps as early as 13,000 years ago, a group
of people carrying Australo-Melanesian genes settled in what is now the
Amazon jungle.
The Amazon basin today is a vast and diverse region encompassing almost
7 million square kilometers, of which approximately 5.5 million square
kilometers are still covered by rainforest.1
The figures only become
meaningful by comparison. The whole of India, with a total area of 3.29
million square kilometers, is less than half the size of the Amazon basin,2
but
Australia, at 7.7 million square kilometers, is bigger,3
as are China (9.59
million square kilometers),4
Canada (9.98 million square kilometers),5
the
United States (9.63 million square kilometers),6
and Europe (10.18 million
square kilometers).7
All in all, then, it’s fair to say that what the Amazon
confronts us with is a truly gigantic landmass, on a similar scale to many of
the world’s largest countries and regions, extending for thousands of
kilometers from north to south and thousands of kilometers from east to west.
There has been no lasting scholarly consensus on the climate, environment,
vegetation, and tree cover of the Ice Age Amazon (see appendix 3 for details)
but the situation is possibly even worse around the issue of the peopling of
this immense region—and indeed around the entire vexed question of how
and when humans began to settle in South America as a whole.
The reader will recall from part 2 that it was Tom Dillehay, professor of
anthropology at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, who first put the cat
among the Clovis pigeons with his excavations at Monte Verde in southern
Chile. The excavations began in 1977 and continue to this day, with multiple
reports and papers published in scientific journals. The story is therefore a
long one, but to make it short let’s just say that Dillehay’s extensive and
meticulous excavations initially revealed, in his own words:
one valid human site (MV-II) dated ~14,500 cal BP. … Although bifacial
projectile points, flaked debitage, and grinding stones were recovered, most lithic
tools were edge-trimmed pebble flakes and sling and grooved bola stones.8
Seen through the distorting lens of the “Clovis First” belief system,
Dillehay’s date looked very threatening—in part because the artifacts, tools,
and points found at Monte Verde had nothing to do with Clovis whatsoever
but more so because to have reached the far south of South America by
14,500 years ago meant that the ancestors of these settlers must have crossed
the Bering land bridge (the full length of two continents away) long before
that and therefore, by definition, that Clovis was very far indeed from being
“first.”
All Dillehay’s battles with Vance Haynes and his supporters were over this
relatively conservative date of 14,500 years ago—and as we’ve seen, Monte
Verde was vindicated in that fight after a site visit in 1997 when the Clovis
Firsters (begrudgingly) conceded defeat.
But the story was far from over and as the excavations at Monte Verde
continued, deeper and older occupation levels began to be exposed, yielding
increasingly more ancient dates. The results of these new studies were
published by Dillehay in November 2015, confirming a revised age for
Monte Verde of around 18,500 years 9
and revealing that the site had been
reoccupied several times thereafter over a period of more than 4,000 years.10
Again in Dillehay’s own words:
The new evidence is multiple, spatially discontinuous, low-density occurrences of
stratigraphic in situ stone artifacts, faunal remains, and burned areas that suggests
discrete horizons of ephemeral human activity radiocarbon dated between ~14,500
and possibly as early as 19,000 cal BP.11
Nor, it seems, is Monte Verde quite done with surprising us. Even as he
was reporting his first paradigm-busting date of 14,500 years ago for MV-II,
Dillehay was already drawing attention, in a rather careful, noncommittal
way, to the possibility that MV-I, another area of the site, might be older—
and not just 18,500 or 19,000 years old but perhaps significantly more than
30,000 years old:
MV-I dated ~33,000 BP … initially defined by scattered occurrences of three claylined, possible culturally produced burned areas and twenty-six stones, at least six
of which suggest modification by humans. This … evidence from MV-I was too
meager and too laterally discontinuous to falsify or verify its archaeological
validity.12
This whole issue, which even the most adamant Clovis Firsters on the 1997
site visit had admitted was “extremely intriguing,”13 was reexamined by
Dillehay and his team in the 2015 study, across several areas of Monte Verde.
Dates as tantalizingly ancient as 43,500 years ago were associated with the
remains and artifacts unearthed, but Dillehay again carefully judged the finds
to be “still too meagre and inconclusive to determine whether they represent
human activity or indeterminate natural features. At present the latter case is
perhaps more feasible given there is presently no convincing archaeological
or other data to substantiate a human presence in South America prior to
20,000 years ago.”14
ONE MORE LINE IN
THE SAND CROSSED
DESPITE HAVING FOR SO LONG been a rebel on the subject of First Americans,
despite having been vindicated in the end on his first date for Monte Verde,
despite having then published new dates pushing the age of the site back
further, and despite those “meagre” hints of even greater antiquity, it does
sound very much as if Dillehay was imitating his former critics here. Just as
they used to argue that there was no convincing archaeological evidence to
substantiate a human presence in South America 14,500 years ago, now he
was saying there was none prior to 20,000 years ago.
When, I wonder, will archaeologists take to heart the old dictum that
absence of evidence is not the same thing as evidence of absence, and learn
the lessons that their own profession has repeatedly taught—namely that the
next turn of the excavator’s spade can change everything? So little of the
surface area of our planet has been subjected to any kind of archaeological
investigation at all that it would be more logical to regard every major
conclusion reached by this discipline as provisional—particularly so when we
are dealing with a period as remote, as tumultuous, and as little understood as
the Ice Age.
I was therefore not at all surprised, after Dillehay had drawn his line in the
sand at 20,000 years ago, that later research, published in August 2017,
confirmed a human presence in South America even earlier in the Ice Age!
This followed decades of study by a team under the leadership of Denis
Vialou of the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris at the Santa
Elina rock shelter in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso.15 Located at the
convergence of two major river basins, and roughly at the geographic center
of South America as a whole, the shelter is known for its huge display of
around 1,000 prehistoric paintings and drawings.16 In the long rectangular
habitation area nearby, Vialou found and excavated a series of beautifully
stratified deposits testifying to different periods of human occupation from
27,600 years ago down to 23,000 years ago.17 Some very finely worked and
drilled bone ornaments were among the objects discovered.18
PEDRA FURADA
MORE THAN 2,000 KILOMETERS NORTHEAST of Santa Elina, the eminent
archaeologist Niède Guidon has spent 40 years excavating hundreds—
literally hundreds!—of richly painted prehistoric rock shelters in Serra da
Capivara National Park in the Brazilian state of Piauí. While everyone else is
playing catch-up, she has long been confident that humans arrived in South
America much earlier than 20,000 years ago. In 1986–3 years before Dillehay
first began to offer his own cautious dissent from the Clovis First paradigm—
she published a paper in Nature boldly titled “Carbon-14 Dates Point to Man
in the Americas 32,000 Years Ago.”19 It was a report on her work at a
particularly large and richly decorated rock shelter called Pedra Furada where
she had excavated “a sequence containing abundant lithic industry and well structured hearths at all levels” documenting continuous human occupation
over the entire period from 6,160 years ago to 32,160 years ago.20 In
addition, she found conclusive evidence that at least one of the spectacular
rock paintings was 17,000 years old:
This pictograph indicates the practice of rupestral art [i.e., rock art] at that time and
makes the site of Pedra Furada the most ancient rupestral art site known in
America and one of the most ancient in the world.21
But this was just the beginning, and in 2003 Guidon and other researchers
completed a further study. The results pushed back the date of the human
presence at Pedra Furada to 48,500 years ago,22 and of the paintings
themselves, to at least 36,000 years ago.23
Most archaeologists—particularly North American archaeologists still
partially under the spell of Clovis First—have not embraced Guidon’s
interpretation of the evidence at Pedra Furada. This, however, does not mean
that she is wrong, only that she is willing to think—and thoroughly
investigate—outside the box. She is an acerbic critic of what she calls the
“climate of scepticism attending old dates”24 that has haunted American
archaeology for so long, and of the unquestioning acceptance of Beringia as
“the only realistic route for human entry to the New World.”25
Guidon does not see any reason why Beringia should have been the only
route of entry:
Everybody is willing to give humans the abilities necessary for voyaging across to
Australia about 60,000 years ago. Why then would it have been impossible for
them to pass from island to island along the Aleutians, just as one example? We
have no justification for converting the humans who peopled the Americas to a
single state of being, where they could do nothing but follow herds by a land
route.26
In another paper anticipating the speculations of geneticists like Skoglund,
Reich, and Willerslev by more than a decade, she goes even further,
reminding us of the puzzling cranial morphology of certain ancient Brazilian
skulls (reviewed in appendix 1) and concluding that, “although little
probable”:
the possibility of migration from Australia and surrounding islands across the
Pacific Ocean … more than 50 k years ago cannot be discarded.27
HIDDEN REALMS
IT IS IN THE AMAZON basin that the oddly misplaced Australasian genetic signal
beats out its enigmatic pulse. As well as being very far indeed from Australia
and Papua New Guinea, however, neither Monte Verde, nor Santa Elina nor
Pedra Furada are in the Amazon Basin—though the latter two are closer than
the former, being respectively about 515 kilometers and 625 kilometers as the
crow flies from the Xingu River, a major southeastern tributary of the
Amazon.28
The long-standing but now thoroughly discredited archaeological model
whereby the Amazon was supposedly uninhabited by humans during the Ice
Age and remained so until less than 1,000 years ago inevitably had a chronic
impact on research priorities and research funding. The result, relative to its
importance in global ecology and its enormous land area, is that very little
archaeology has been done in the Amazon basin at all and very little of what
has been done—truly a tiny fraction—focuses on Ice Age occupation levels.
A refreshing exception, however, is the work of the ever open-minded
Anna Curtenius Roosevelt, currently professor of anthropology at the
University of Illinois, whom we encountered in chapter 11. On April 19,
1996, she and a group of co researchers took to the pages of Science to
publish the results of their study of Pedra Pintada, another beautifully painted
rock shelter in Brazil but this time located right in the heart of the Amazon
basin at the confluence of the Tapajos and Amazon Rivers.29
Here Roosevelt and her team excavated multiple occupation layers
spanning the Holocene (our current era) and the late Pleistocene (the Ice
Age), with the oldest and deepest turning out possibly to be as old as 16,000
years (according to thermoluminescence dating) and 14,200 years (according
to radiocarbon dating).30
Conclusion?
The human presence in Caverna de Pedra Pintada during the late Pleistocene is
established by numerous artifacts. … The dated materials are associated in
stratigraphic context at the beginning of a long cultural sequence. There is no prehuman biological material that could have mixed with the cultural remains, which
are stratigraphically separated from later Holocene assemblages by a culturally
sterile layer. … The discovery of Paleo-indians along the Amazon confirms earlier
evidence that the Paleoindian radiation was more complex than current theories
provide for.31
Indeed so! And even in these days of man-made ecological disaster let us
remind ourselves that 5.5 million square kilometers of the Amazon basin is
still covered by rainforest. To put that in perspective, picture Mexico,
Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, and El Salvador. Taken together they
encompass 2.22 million square kilometers 32—not nearly enough—so we will
need to add on India with its 2.97 million square kilometers to get an
imaginary realm almost equivalent in size to the Amazon rainforest.33 My point here is that when we consider the Amazon as an archaeological project,
its scale is comparable to Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, El Salvador,
AND India all added together, and all, in addition, entirely covered by
dense rainforest and therefore difficult and expensive to access. Moreover,
unlike Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, and El Salvador, where the
famous Maya civilization flourished, and unlike India with its ancient cities
and temples, there was, as we’ve seen, no inducement for archaeologists to
invest scarce time and money on excavations in the Amazon while it was
believed that nothing of great interest would be found there. At the close of
the second decade of the twenty-first century no serious archaeologists are
still thinking that way! The state of affairs they’ve inherited, however, means
that huge swaths of the Amazon, encompassing millions of square
kilometers, have never been subject to any kind of archaeological
investigation at all.
This is a wider problem than the Amazon. For example, sea level rose 120
meters when the Ice Age came to an end with the result that 27 million square
kilometers of land that was above water at the last glacial maximum 21,000
years ago is under water today.34 These submerged continental shelves were
prime seafront real estate during the Ice Age, yet only a few tiny slivers of
them have ever been subject to any kind of marine archaeological
investigation. Again, this is because, like the Amazon, access requires special
preparations, equipment, and transportation and also because of a similar
belief that whatever would be found as a result of these costly investigations
would not add greatly to what is already known.
I’ll say nothing about Antarctica, with its 14 million square kilometers
entirely virgin to the archaeologist’s spade.35 The almost universal agreement
that humans could never have lived there in the past might or might not be
correct, but we’ll never know for sure unless we look.
We do know that the Sahara desert, presently occupying an area of about 9
million square kilometers,36 had a very different climate during the Ice Age,
and in the early millennia of the Holocene, than it experiences today and that
there were long periods when it was well watered and fertile, with extensive
lakes and grasslands and abundant wildlife.37 It is near enough to Egypt and
the other great centers of early civilization in North Africa and the Middle
East to have attracted the attention of archaeologists, but like the Amazon and like the submerged continental shelves, access is difficult and expensive,
placing serious practical limits on what can be achieved.
Part of our predicament, therefore, as a species with amnesia, is that huge
areas of the planet that we know for sure were used by and lived upon by our
ancestors—the submerged continental shelves, the Sahara desert, the Amazon
rainforest—have, for a variety of practical and ideological reasons, been
badly served by archaeology. The truth is, we know VERY little about the
real prehistory of any of these places, and the tiny patches that have thus far
been surveyed and excavated within them are no legitimate basis upon which
to draw conclusions and express certainties about the vast areas that remain
unsurveyed and unexcavated.
Guatemala, in central America, was one of the six countries I suggested we
put together to envisage the scale of the Amazon rainforest. Guatemala itself
encompasses just under 109,000 square kilometers.38 It’s an indication of
how pointless it is to take any so-called facts about the past for granted,
however, that even in this tiny country, fifty times smaller than the Amazon,
a huge archaeological surprise was unveiled in 2018.
“Everything is turned on its head,” commented Ithaca College
archaeologist Thomas Garrison on the results of a survey of 2,100 square
kilometers of Guatemala’s densely forested northern Peten region.39
Deploying Lidar (Light Detection and Ranging) pulsed laser technology,
what the survey revealed, in areas quite close to known and even famous and
well-visited Mayan sites such as Tikal, were more than 60,000 previously
unsuspected ancient houses, palaces, defensive walls, fortresses, and other
structures as well as quarries, elevated highways connecting urban centers,
and complex irrigation and terracing systems that would have been capable of
supporting intensive agriculture.40 Previously scholars had believed that only
scattered city-states had existed in an otherwise sparsely populated region,
but the Lidar images make it clear, as Garrison puts it, that “scale and
population density had been grossly underestimated.”41
Katheryn Reese-Taylor, a University of Calgary archaeologist, adds:
After decades of combing through the forests, no archaeologists had stumbled
across these sites. More importantly, we never had the big picture that this data
gives us. It really pulls back the veil and helps us see the civilization as the ancient
Maya saw it.42
When pulling back the veil on the relatively recent Maya civilization in a
small part of the tiny country of Guatemala can produce so many surprises,
we may begin to imagine what “big picture” might come to light if the vastly
larger and more opaque veil that has covered the Amazon rainforest for so
long were to be drawn back.
Hopefully the interest will be there and the funds made available for it to
be drawn back thoroughly using the latest scanning technologies followed up
by site surveys and excavations. Until that happens, however, no
archaeologist is in any position to dismiss the possibility that the very old and
very troublesome Australo-Melanesian genetic signal that has been detected
among Amazonian populations might have gotten there by the “most
parsimonious” route—namely, by a direct crossing of the Pacific from
Australasia to South America.
That, in turn, would imply a civilization capable of great oceanic voyages
and therefore by definition at a much more advanced stage of development
than archaeologists are prepared to accept for any branch of humanity during
the Ice Age.
next
BLACK EARTH
No comments:
Post a Comment