The First South Americans

Speaker 1 Ever wondered why the Romans were defeated in the Tudorberg Forest? What secrets lie buried in prehistoric Ireland? Or what made Alexander truly great?

Speaker 1 With a subscription to History Hit, you can explore our ancient past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists.

Speaker 1 You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week covering everything from the ancient world to World War II.

Speaker 1 Just visit historyhit.com/slash subscribe.

Speaker 3 Dashing through the store, Dave's looking for a gift.

Speaker 2 One you can't ignore, but not the socks he picks.

Speaker 3 I know, I'm putting them back.

Speaker 4 Hey, Dave, here's a tip: put scratchers on your list.

Speaker 6 Oh, scratchers, good idea.

Speaker 7 It's an easy shopping trip.

Speaker 3 We're glad we could assist.

Speaker 8 Thanks, random singing people.

Speaker 9 So be like Dave this holiday and give the gift of play.

Speaker 11 Scratchers from the California lottery.

Speaker 12 A little play can make your day.

Speaker 13 Please play responsibly. Must be 18 years or older to purchase play or claim.

Speaker 14 New products to launch? New people to develop? New goals to crush? Workday Go is designed for small and mid-sized businesses.

Speaker 14 By bringing HR and finance together on one AI platform, you'll have everything you need to think big, go big, and grow big. And activation is fast.

Speaker 14 It takes just 30 to 60 business days to get you up and running. Simplify your SMB on an AI platform you'll never outgrow.
Workday go

Speaker 16 this holiday season. Millions of families will pack their bags, load up the car, and head off for a family vacation.
But not every trip is going to be somewhere fun.

Speaker 16 The American Red Cross responds to about 7,000 emergencies during the holiday season alone, from home fires to natural disasters, providing families a safe place to go when the unthinkable happens.

Speaker 16 But they can't do it without your support. Please donate at redcross.org.

Speaker 1 It's the ancients on history hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host.
And today we're heading to prehistoric South America.

Speaker 1 A few months back, I received an email from an avid ancients listener called Franco.

Speaker 1 Now, Franco, he suggested that we start looking into the archaeology of South America, which is often overlooked compared to other areas of the world.

Speaker 1 And we thought that that was a brilliant idea, and so today, we're bringing some of this fascinating archaeology into the spotlight, and we're going back more than 10,000 years.

Speaker 1 Now, you might remember that we recently released an episode all about Ice Age North America. and the story of the first people to reach this continent more than 10,000 years ago.

Speaker 1 That episode, with Dr. David Meltzer, proved incredibly popular and do check it out if you haven't listened to it already after this one.

Speaker 1 But it also felt like it was only half of the story. We've done the first people in North America, but what has the archaeology revealed about the first people in South America?

Speaker 1 How long did it take for humans to go from north to south? Well, joining me to talk through what we know is a man who has been at the forefront of this research for the past 40 years, Dr.

Speaker 1 Tom Dillahay from Vanderbilt University.

Speaker 1 Tom has worked and written papers papers about several key archaeological sites along the Pacific coast of South America, in particular the extraordinary site of Monte Verde in Chile.

Speaker 1 The incredible array of discoveries made there have completely revised what people thought about when the first humans settled in South America, who they were, and how they lived.

Speaker 1 Tom explains all and much more as we delve into the story of the first South Americans.

Speaker 1 Tom, it is wonderful to have you on on the podcast today.

Speaker 17 Well, thank you. I appreciate being here.

Speaker 1 Now, the populating of South America, the first human settlement in South America. Tom, this feels like a massive topic.
I hope you're ready.

Speaker 1 Now, is this quite an exciting time for the field with new developments and discoveries? Because we've recently done an interview with David Meltzer about the first humans in North America.

Speaker 1 And he was saying how it's very exciting at the moment with new scientific research and methods. Is it a similar case with the first South Americans too?

Speaker 17 Absolutely.

Speaker 17 You know, the two continents are connected because in South America, specialists see the peopling of the continent coming from North America, obviously, down through Central America, across Panama, into the continent.

Speaker 17 What's really exciting is not only new discoveries going on up and down the Western Hemisphere, and particularly in recent years in South America and also in the Amazon and along the coastlines as well.

Speaker 17 But also genetics, as my colleague David Meltzer probably talked about, has added a very new and exciting dimension to the discipline related to connections between

Speaker 17 different kinds of sites and geographic vectors of movement and so forth. But also what's been found in recent years in South America is exciting because

Speaker 17 we have a number of South Americanists themselves from different countries who have been getting their degrees in the U.S.

Speaker 17 and South American universities, North America, going back and doing a lot more research on this topic. So everything's coming together and coalescing in a new exciting movement.

Speaker 1 A new exciting movement. So it feels like the perfect time to have got you on the podcast.
And I must admit, recently we also did an interview, an episode on the ancient Amazon.

Speaker 1 And it's been a pleasure exploring the Americas thousands of years ago and the archaeology that is coming to light. For

Speaker 1 the first humans, the populating of South America, Tom, do we have a rich archaeological record for, let's say, more than 10,000 years ago in South America?

Speaker 17 It's not as rich as North America. The reason being is because there are fewer investigators over the past, let's say, 50 or 60 years working the continent.

Speaker 17 But the record has increased significantly and mainly along the Pacific coast and the desert areas of northern Chile and Peru, but also in the high andes as well.

Speaker 17 But there's always been a great deal of work for some curious reasons of people looking at the peopling of South America from the viewpoint of southern Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego.

Speaker 17 But also in recent years, largely due to Brazilian and French archaeologists, a lot more work has been going on in Brazil.

Speaker 1 And so right at the moment then, is there quite...

Speaker 17 for the sites so far discovered, just because of the nature of archaeological work so far, Tom, are the majority of the sites then located on that pacific coast let's say west of that andean ridgeline almost absolutely here we have to talk about what we call archaeological visibility when you get into the amazon jungle you've got a dense forest and preservation of the record is is difficult organics are not well preserved soils have acid that eat the organic material you've got the dense forest but when you're working in the open deserts west of the andean mountains as you mentioned archaeological visibility is a lot easier.

Speaker 17 You can see things. On the other hand, the sites are often eroded by water and wind, too.
So there's some issues there, but a lot of people in archaeology prefer to work along that Pacific coastline.

Speaker 17 But these gaps across the continent are beginning to be picked up by South Americans working in their own countries.

Speaker 1 Forgive my ignorance, Tom, but if someone mentions desert, I might immediately, having grown up in Europe, I might think of, let's say, the Sahara Desert or the Gobi Desert in the Middle East.

Speaker 1 When talking about deserts in South America, I mean, geographically, do they look quite different to the ones we might imagine in Europe?

Speaker 17 No, they're probably similar in some ways. First of all, the world's driest deserts, the Atacama Desert in northern Chile.

Speaker 17 And that desert extends all the way up to what we call the Altiplano, the high lands in Bolivia that reach up to 14,000 feet in elevation. That is still desert.
But you have the desert also

Speaker 17 along the entire coast of Peru until you get into the forested and grasslands of the Andes. But also you have kind of a semi-desert once you get into the Patagonian area.

Speaker 17 It's kind of like a dry steppe grassland with where the visibility archaeologically is easier than it would be in the Amazon basin.

Speaker 1 If we're going, let's say, more than 10,000 years ago, so I'm guessing if, let's say, people are going down that side of the Andes at that time, how different topographically do we think the whole landscape would have looked then?

Speaker 1 Do we think back then it would have been inhospitable desert too?

Speaker 17 I would say the deserts I was just talking about probably would have been grasslands. And since then, things have become drier and less moist.

Speaker 17 One thing that distinguishes North and South America is that you have these massive glacial ice sheets in the north.

Speaker 17 that kind of prevented movement from, let's say, Yukon, Alaska, down into the lower u.48 but the only place that you had any glaciers that might have prohibited human movement in south america was in the high andes central andes and down toward patagonia so movement was a lot easier across north south east west diagonally and so forth but getting back to your question The Amazon probably 12, 14, 15,000 years ago is not the dense green shag carpet we think of today.

Speaker 17 It was savannas, parklands, open forest here and there. And since the late Pleistocene period, it began to fill in with this dense high canopy forest we think of today.

Speaker 17 And then the deserts would have been, as I said, grasslands. So, no, ecologically, it would have been very different in a lot of different places.

Speaker 1 Well, let's focus on a couple of sites that seem key. And I know the sites that you've worked on a lot, Tom, done a lot of work on these sites for this whole topic of the peopling of South America.

Speaker 1 And the first one, I mean, first of all, it struck me with its location because it feels quite far south.

Speaker 1 I would immediately think that a lot of these sites would be, let's say, near Mexico or Mesoamerica, but we've got one much further south, Monte Verde. Now, what is Monte Verde?

Speaker 17 Well, Monte Verde is located in northern Patagonia, in what would be the

Speaker 17 cool temperate rainforest of southern Chile, what they call the lake district, in the ecological zone that's kind of equivalent perhaps to northern Europe in some ways, bogs and swampy terrain.

Speaker 17 But Monte Verde came to me. I was teaching at the time at the Southern University of Chile in Valdivio, about 400 kilometers farther north.

Speaker 17 And one day a student came to the university with a very large quote-unquote cow's tooth. It was brought to my attention, and that cow's tooth turned out to be

Speaker 17 a mastodon gompfithir tooth. And at the time, I didn't have too much much interest in it.
I said, Look, if I ever get down that way further south, I'll take a look at it. And I did.

Speaker 17 About a year later, I got down there and we found some large ribs and other teeth eroding out of an embankment of a small creek called Chinchiwapi Creek that the local forest people use

Speaker 17 for

Speaker 17 bringing out cut timber in the local forests on ox carts, basically. So I began in 1977 excavating at the site, 77 through about 87 in the last century.

Speaker 17 And fortunately, the site was overlaid by a peat bog, something that certainly in Europe and in England, you guys know about.

Speaker 17 And it preserved the organic material underneath, where we found pieces of hide, pieces of meat, edible and medicinal plants.

Speaker 17 worked wood, the bones of different mastodons that have been killed, stone tools, and the remains of what looks like a large tent-like structure that had fallen over the years, obviously and collapsed.

Speaker 17 So it was just full of all kinds of things that you normally don't get in late Ice Age Pleistocene sites anywhere in the world.

Speaker 17 What you normally get, maybe bones preserve, stone tools, occasionally a fire pit.

Speaker 1 I mean, Tom, it sounds like an archaeological treasure trove. And to think, so it was only discovered back in the late 1970s with the discovery of this part of this great Ice Age beast, this mastodon.

Speaker 17 Exactly. And there turned out to be remains of seven different mastodons or what we call gonfothirs today.

Speaker 17 And the kill site was probably located outside of what I'm describing, which was the campsite of the people.

Speaker 1 Well, how far back do we think the human story at Monte Verde stretches?

Speaker 17 Well, what I'm talking about with the preserved organic materials at the site, which kind of shocked the archaeological discipline in the Americas and beyond, dated 14,500 years ago.

Speaker 17 That was 1,500 years ahead of the most accepted paradigm or theory of the peopling of the Americas, the Clovis theory. But I'm talking about Monte Berdi II.

Speaker 17 There's a Monte Berdi I located nearby that has very small fire pits, a few

Speaker 17 convincing stone tools, a few bone remains, but it's not overcovered by peat lens that preserved the site. And that dates at 16 and 18 and 24 and 33,000 years ago.

Speaker 17 So it's just scattered little ephemeral pieces of evidence in another part of the site at different depths. And that one, I admit, is unproven.

Speaker 17 We need to do more archaeological and geological work on what I just described as Monte Berthy I. But Monte Berdi II, overlaid by that peat layer, is solid evidence.

Speaker 1 So we'll leave Monte Verdi I for another day then and focus in on this amazing archaeology from Monte Verde II.

Speaker 1 But Tom, if you don't mind, just before we do that, you mentioned the whole Clovis theory before kind of discovery of Monte Verde. I mean, what was the belief?

Speaker 1 about the peopling of South America, let's say before the 1980s or the 1990s, and how this new discovery kind of starts to change that.

Speaker 17 Yeah, if you look at the whole peopling of the Americas, it kind of follows the same pattern in Europe.

Speaker 17 Back in the late 1800s, the question came up, were humans ever associated with extinct, what we call megafauna here in the Americas.

Speaker 17 It would have been the American horse, giant bison, ground sloth, woolly mammoth, so forth. So the first solid evidence came out in the 30s at the Clovis site.

Speaker 17 Here in New Mexico, I'm three hours away from that site, where they found several woolly mammoths killed associated with these magnificent lancelit points with a flute and the base of it.

Speaker 17 And that was the first evidence, and that was Clovis' first theory: that the first Americans are these big game hunters who came over from Siberia or Northeast Asia and rapidly moved throughout the Americas down into South America.

Speaker 17 And in the early 1940s, the late Junius Bird of the American Museum of Natural History in New York was working in southern Patagonia near Tierra del Fuego, and he excavated a cave called Fells Cave.

Speaker 17 That cave yielded what's called fishtail points, projectile points. And in the base of it, allegedly kind of a flute-like removal of a flake, something similar to Clovis.

Speaker 17 And at that time in South America, the evidence was incredibly scarce.

Speaker 17 So the connection was made between the peopling of the north, peopling of the south. Clovis had moved very rapidly all the way from the north down to South America in Patagonia at Fells Cave.

Speaker 17 And that was the theory that was set for the next 70 years or so.

Speaker 17 There's always been sites, other sites in North and South America, a few in Mexico as well, that have threatened the Clovis first paradigm or theory, but people debunked them because the proponents of Clovis are a strong-headed group of people.

Speaker 17 It was the first theory, and we're going to hold on to it. So a lot of these sites were legitimately rejected.

Speaker 17 The radiocarbon data was questionable, the geological stratigraphy questionable, human artifacts questionable. That goes on to today.

Speaker 17 And in the late 70s through the 80s, excavating Monte Berdi was probably the first archaeological site in the Americas, along with Metacroft Shelter in Pennsylvania, that really threatened the Clovis paradigm.

Speaker 17 In around 2010 or 11, after some 30 years of excavating, Monte Berdi was finally accepted as the site that broke the Clovis barrier, so to speak.

Speaker 1 Tom, you've had a hell of a battle on your hands there. Wow.
And your persistence is incredibly commendable because you say now accepted.

Speaker 1 And the artifacts that are coming out from that area are extraordinary. So it must feel maybe not even a battle, a war won over those many, many years.

Speaker 17 Yeah, it was. I mean, it was difficult at times times with people.
You know, Thomas Kuhn wrote a book called The Structure Scientific Revolution, talking about paradigm change in science.

Speaker 17 And he says that well-entrenched models and theories like, he doesn't talk about Clovis, but we could say Clovis, takes a long, long time to overthrow those theories with a lot of evidence, a lot of persistence.

Speaker 17 There's personal attacks involved. people attacking the data.
It took us about 30, 35 years to convince people.

Speaker 17 And what made it easier for me, well, it wasn't easy, let me say that, was that I was doing other projects too. And so it was kind of like my default projects that kept my mind pretty straight.

Speaker 17 And I just, the preponderance of evidence of interly at Monteverde convinced the discipline.

Speaker 17 But following Kuhn, the paradigm never completely falls until, as he says, the last die-hard proponents of the old theory die away.

Speaker 1 Let's explore Monteverde now. And before the artifacts, I think it'd be best actually to get an idea of the landscape.

Speaker 1 Not the landscape now, but what research suggests this landscape looks like some 15,000 years ago that might, well, I'm sure, will give us more of an idea as to why this particular area seems to have been so attractive to these early people.

Speaker 17 Yeah, first of all, back then, the site was about 50 kilometers away from the Pacific coast, located in the headwaters of a small stream called Chinchihapi, that was at the time probably about five meters wide.

Speaker 17 And it was located in an

Speaker 17 open forest, what we call a cool temperate rainforest. And what you could see back then, certainly and today from Monte Berdi, are three snow-capped volcanoes, all of which are active.

Speaker 17 So the setting was quite nice, but in that area was boggy terrain, several creeks as well, a pretty well-endowed forest with a lot of resources.

Speaker 17 The animals would have been the mastodonts we talked about, the American horse, ground sloth, and smaller game as well.

Speaker 17 But the resources we found at the site and excavated, plant remains, eggshells, some birds, and other edibles.

Speaker 17 come from a radius stretching all the way out to the coast up into the Indian mountains 30 kilometers to the east.

Speaker 17 So it looks like these people were moving up and down a river that was located about five kilometers away called the Maoyin River, up and down that river that connected the Andean Mountains in the east to the Pacific coast.

Speaker 17 And in fact, we found 16 different species of edible seaweeds at the site. So it's pretty strong evidence these people were beach combers.

Speaker 17 You know, they were roaming the beaches and picking up seaweed, much like the indigenous people do today in the the area. Those people are called Wiliche

Speaker 17 and exploiting a lot of the wood products too. We had 13 different species of wood.
Some were used in this construction, like pole frame of this tent-like structure I mentioned.

Speaker 17 Others was used for firewood, others for tools and so forth. So just an incredible array of artifacts, well preserved.

Speaker 1 You mentioned the tent first of all, and that really, really intrigues me for something that's more than 10,000 years old.

Speaker 17 So can you explain a bit more about that and what that suggests about the nature of the site because i'm envisaging right now something like a campsite yeah it is we found two structures at the site one was isolated about 30 meters away from this longer tent-like structure and this was wishbone shaped where they piled up sand and rock as a foundation and pushed poles into it And those poles were inclined toward the centerpiece and draped with animal hides.

Speaker 17 I'm talking about paleolama and mastodon hides. And it collapsed, obviously.
So what we found inside that hut was just one item, five masticated cuds full of medicinal plants.

Speaker 17 So what we think was is probably a medicinal hut.

Speaker 17 And located 30 meters away was the foundations of timbers, branches of trees laid out kind of a rectangular fashion. Think of it like an ice tray formation.
And they were staked into the ground.

Speaker 17 There were stakes that the heads were pounded flat and the points that were down into the pushed into the ground were burned to harden the tips.

Speaker 17 And in there, and amongst that, we found small fire pits. We found edible plants, medicinal plants, chunks of meat from the mastodonts that were killed.

Speaker 17 bone tools, stone tools, and wood tools as well. The kind of trash that you would expect if you were camping somewhere for a long period of time.
You see, all of this had collapsed.

Speaker 17 And what we found in both those structures on the floors were tiny microscopic pieces of hide that was preserved because the structure obviously had collapsed over time.

Speaker 17 And we estimate in looking at the plant remains that mature during all periods of the year that people at Monte Berthi II probably live there at least 10 months, but probably close to one year.

Speaker 1 I mean, mean, Tom, that was going to be my question. Like, do we think that it's only occupied for the past the year, then they're moving elsewhere and kind of almost semi-nomadic?

Speaker 1 But it's interesting what you're saying there, that almost seems to be consistent use of Monte Verde, which is staggering and astonishing when learning about these very early people in this area of South America.

Speaker 17 Yeah, I mean, when you look at the plant remains, we had 73 different edible and medicinal plant remains there, including the seaweeds.

Speaker 17 And you look at the use of the woods for different functions, firewood, making tools there's one tree species called maki and it's very flexible so when the wind blows it kind of adapts to the wind and the structure would sway a little bit probably the point being these people had intimate knowledge of that forest and that setting and that indicates that they were there for a long time before monteberde to learn where these resources were and how to use them.

Speaker 17 And the fact that a lot of these resources come from the Andean mountains to the east and down toward the coast and out in a broad radius probably suggests there were other peoples around obviously and they were exchanging products with them.

Speaker 1 Finding a therapist who not only has time for new clients, but also actually takes your insurance can feel impossible. Deciding to reach out and ask for help is huge.

Speaker 1 To then be hit by wall after wall can be so demoralizing.

Speaker 1 Many therapists don't take insurance packages at all, which means that you're stuck paying the full cost out of pocket or paying for an expensive monthly subscription. That's where Ruler comes in.

Speaker 1 They partner with over 100 insurance plans, making the average copay just $15 per session.

Speaker 1 Now that's real therapy, from licensed professionals chosen based on your particular situation at a price that actually makes sense.

Speaker 1 You use your insurance benefits to maintain your physical health, so why wouldn't you do the same for your mental health?

Speaker 1 Thousands of people are already using Ruler to get affordable, high-quality therapy that's actually covered by insurance. Visit ruler.com slash ancients to get started.

Speaker 1 After you sign up, you'll be asked how you heard about them. Please support our show and let them know we sent you.
That's rula.com slash ancients.

Speaker 1 You deserve mental health care that works with you, not against your budget.

Speaker 18 This holiday, Verizon is helping you bundle up incredible gifts and savings. You'll get the latest phone with a new line on my plan, and a brand new smartwatch and tablet.

Speaker 18 No trade-in needed, even on our lowest price plan. That's two gifts for your family and one for you.
Or two for you and one for someone else. Or three gifts for you and only you.

Speaker 18 Either way, you save big on three amazing gifts at Verizon. All on the best 5G network.
Visit Verizon today. Rankings based on Root Metrics Root Score Report dated 1 each 2025.

Speaker 19 Your results may vary. Service plan required for watch and tablet.
Additional terms apply.

Speaker 14 New products to launch? New people to develop? New goals to crush? Workday Go is designed for small and mid-sized businesses.

Speaker 14 By bringing HR and finance together on one AI platform, you'll have everything you need to think big, go big, and grow big. And activation is fast.

Speaker 14 It takes just 30 to 60 business days to get you up and running. Simplify your SMB on an AI platform you'll never outgrow.
Workday go.

Speaker 3 Dashing through the store, Dave's looking for a gift.

Speaker 2 One you can't ignore, but not the socks he picks.

Speaker 3 I know, I'm putting them back.

Speaker 4 Hey, Dave, here's a tip.

Speaker 5 Put scratchers on your list.

Speaker 6 Oh, scratchers, good idea.

Speaker 7 It's an easy shopping trip.

Speaker 3 We're glad we could assist.

Speaker 8 Thanks, random singing people.

Speaker 9 So be like Dave this holiday and give the gift of play.

Speaker 11 Scratches from the California lottery, a little play can make your day.

Speaker 13 Please play responsibly. Must be 18 years or older to purchase play or claim.

Speaker 1 Well, this actually brings you on to another question because you mentioned earlier how so much of this material has survived in the peats, material that wouldn't usually survive.

Speaker 1 So, as special as Monte Verde is, should we not be thinking of, you know, oh, we found this one site, as you say, and there mustn't be any other sites in the area.

Speaker 1 It's just perhaps the soil preservation has allowed Monte Verde to survive, but we should be imagining, and perhaps they haven't survived, that nearby there would have been other settlements dating to a similar time, contemporary to Monte Verde II.

Speaker 17 That's a very good point. And that is where we're moving toward today.

Speaker 17 There are other archaeologists beginning to examine and cut banks peat lenses and looking for other sites there is one possible site north of monteberdi about about 110 kilometers away called pilauco that has preserved animal bones embedded in a peat lens as well so your point is well taken there are probably other sites similar to it the problem is is that in in the americas unlike where you're at and in other parts of Europe, where you're accustomed to what's called wet sites preserved by peat bogs, late sites, early sites, and so forth.

Speaker 17 Here in the Americas, there's only three known wet sites that have ever been excavated, two in North America and now Monte Verde.

Speaker 17 So there's not a tradition of looking for these kinds of sites in the field, although the same kind of terrain is there. to search for them.

Speaker 1 Have there been human remains discovered from Monte Verde alongside faunal remains, alongside stone tools and so on?

Speaker 17 No, there have not been. First of all, if these people were there 10, 12 months, what's the likelihood of somebody dying and being buried there?

Speaker 17 So a lot of these sites are short-term occupation sites. But we did find three human footprints in the site.

Speaker 17 Somebody, probably a sub-adult, they're about 11 centimeters long, walked across a patch of clay in the site. And with one of them, it's very clear.

Speaker 17 You can see the arc impression, the heel, and the five toe prints. And the other two are there.
So it's right foot, left foot, right foot across a patch of clay.

Speaker 17 But what you have brought up is a very interesting point. In the Americas, there's probably no more than three legitimate, well-dated human skeleton remains, and not the complete skeleton either.

Speaker 17 in the entire Western hemisphere that date before 10,000 years ago.

Speaker 17 So the problem is this.

Speaker 17 What's the mortuary pattern of these first Americans?

Speaker 17 Were they dumping them in bodies of water or things like swamps and bogs? Were they cremating the remains and placing them somewhere else?

Speaker 17 Were they committing some form of cannibalism, then getting rid of the remains? We do not understand the mortuary patterns of the first Americans.

Speaker 17 And that creates a problem for the genetic studies because the genetic analyses are going to come from mainly those human skeletons.

Speaker 17 And it's completely different from the old world where you are, Africa, Australia, Asia, Europe.

Speaker 17 They have found numerous human skeletons of different time periods, as you well know, not in the Americas.

Speaker 1 It's very interesting indeed. Yes, in my mind where it is, Ego.

Speaker 1 I mean, here in Britain, we have a very rich record, and that has really helped us learn more about that deep prehistory of Britain and indeed in other places.

Speaker 1 And yes, I guess then we have to focus on the artifacts that you do have at these sites in abundance.

Speaker 1 In particular, it feels like the one thing we haven't really focused on quite yet at Monteverde, which is, Tom, the tools. I mean, what types of tools were these people using?

Speaker 17 The one thing that always comes to mind with these early sites, stone tools. So we've got lancelet points, projectile points, spear points, as you might want to call them.

Speaker 17 We've got stone scrapers, cutting tools, grinding stones for crushing plants, and a wide array of adzes and perforators with stones.

Speaker 17 And then in the wood area, we have what appear to be digging sticks. We found the remains of wild potatoes at Monte Berli.

Speaker 17 So what people use today are cow ribs are wooden sticks to dig the potatoes out. And we found starch grains of potatoes on the edges of some of these wooden sticks.

Speaker 17 There's also, we found the remains of two wooden lances that had been broken and placed on top of fire pits. Seems to be some kind of decommissioning of the site or ritual.
I don't know.

Speaker 17 The points of them were sharpened and burned to harden them. So there's a wide array of wooden tools and a few bone tools as well, some probably used as digging sticks, quote and unquote.

Speaker 17 and others kind of looked like adses. They were breaking off the bones of the tusk of the mastodonts and using those as well.

Speaker 17 And then a couple of the molars, large molars of the mastodonts, seem to have been used as choppers for chopping material too. They've been crushed in a very different way than we would expect.

Speaker 17 So there's a wide array of organic and inorganic tools at the site, including the wood that was used to construct these two structures I was talking about, the tents.

Speaker 17 and also the wooden stakes as well. So it's quite a sophisticated technology.

Speaker 1 I mean, Tom, I must admit, I'm most fascinated by those wooden tools and, you know, objects that have survived because usually those don't survive.

Speaker 1 So to imagine also those sticks potentially being used, say, to dig up wild potatoes like a foraging stick.

Speaker 1 To me, that's even more interesting than the burned areas or the faunal remains because you just don't usually see that.

Speaker 17 No, you don't. That's why Monte Verity for a long time, beyond the radiocarbon dates of being 1500 years older than Clovis was controversial.

Speaker 17 How can you have these kinds of things? We haven't found this before and it was somewhat shocking to the discipline.

Speaker 1 Now, I want to bring in the link with North America. As mentioned, we've done an episode recently on humans reaching North America with David Meltzer.
And the toolkit of these

Speaker 1 first North Americans. Can you see strong similarities with the toolkits, the artifacts discovered from a place like Monte Verde?

Speaker 1 Or is there evidence that maybe theory that as humans went to South America, that they developed

Speaker 1 their different styles of tools to suit these other habitats that they were living in?

Speaker 17 A very good question, and you're right at the truth.

Speaker 17 As they went through different ecological zones, adapting to different places at different times with this environment over thousands of years constantly changing, then they had to adapt their life ways, and that included consumption of different resources and different technologies.

Speaker 17 But we do see in the scrapers and the ADSs and cutting stone tools and the projectile points, some degree of similarity.

Speaker 17 And also what we find a lot of in South America, and I haven't mentioned this, are what's called bola stones. These are spheroids that have grooves around them.

Speaker 17 They're still used today by some of the indigenous groups in Patagonia.

Speaker 17 They're used as sling stones or as kind of bolas that you throw and it wraps around the legs of a bird or small animal or stuns them by hitting them and you capture them.

Speaker 17 These were found at Monte Verde and founded a number of early sites in Patagonia. And they're also found at early sites along the Rio Grande in cave sites in Texas and

Speaker 17 New Mexico. So there are some similarities, yes.

Speaker 1 We talked about the occupying of this site seemingly for most of the year.

Speaker 1 How long do we think Monte Verde was occupied for? How many generations? I mean, roughly how many years do we think Monte Verde is this active place in this area of South America?

Speaker 17 Well, the site, going back to its geological setting, is on a high portion, the upper end of this creek, that's on a high ridge that runs from east to west.

Speaker 17 So it would be kind of a footpath from the ocean to the Andes. But Monte Verde II, as I've mentioned before, may be occupied for a year.

Speaker 17 But if Monte Verde I, with these different depths of minute portions of evidence suggesting a human presence off and on for another 10, 12, 15,000 years, there exists the possibility of people there long before Monte Verde II at 14,500 years ago.

Speaker 17 It's just unproven as yet. And the problem is once you excavate Monte Verde II, it's like going from riches to rags because there we have this

Speaker 17 posity of information, you know, in the deeper levels.

Speaker 17 There are some sites in Brazil and elsewhere in South America that might date 16,000 to 20,000, 22,000 years ago, but they're controversial as well, as is Monte Verde I,

Speaker 17 and they still need to be proven. So there's hints out across the continent.
of people being there earlier, as there are in North America as well.

Speaker 1 Is there any evidence that people were coming back to that place for thousands of years after that?

Speaker 1 Or has the archaeology not revealed, I mean, kind of later layers almost from that area of the world yet?

Speaker 17 At Montiber, they, no, we have no evidence that after 14,500 years ago that people were coming back. So let me quickly insert one thing here.
What we found at the site was a very thin layer of ash.

Speaker 17 covering the site, about half a millimeter thickness to a millimeter in thickness and ash, probably eruptions from the volcanoes to the east.

Speaker 17 And I suspect, and I haven't published on this because it's too much speculation, but I'll say it now, that perhaps they abandoned the site as a result of volcanic eruptions, as people do today when there are volcanic eruptions.

Speaker 17 And they did not come back to the site. But there probably are other sites in the area where they were visiting other places, as we talked about before.

Speaker 1 Probably that makes it even the more extraordinary. What a fascinating snapshot this archaeology is revealing about people in this one site some, you know, roughly 14,500 years ago.

Speaker 1 And I guess it's also exciting. You've been working there for so many years, Tom.
What archaeologists might discover from that layer in the future?

Speaker 1 Do you think there's still more out there from Monte Verde II and probably from elsewhere nearby?

Speaker 17 Well, there is. In fact, I'm going down, I'll be excavating there at Monte Verde 1 in March.
And there likely are more sites. It just takes more time, more resources.

Speaker 17 And also, one thing I haven't mentioned is that the team working at Monthly Berry, because of the preservation of so many organic remains, is composed of almost 70 specialists.

Speaker 17 We've got insect specialists, geneticists, we've got wood specialists, seaweed specialists, so on and so forth. So, to do this kind of work, it requires a big team and a lot of resources.

Speaker 3 Dashing through the store, Dave's looking for a gift.

Speaker 2 One you can't ignore, but not the socks he picks.

Speaker 3 I know, I'm putting them back.

Speaker 4 Hey, Dave, here's a tip: put scratchers on your list.

Speaker 6 Oh, scratchers, good idea.

Speaker 7 It's an easy shopping trip.

Speaker 3 We're glad we could assist.

Speaker 8 Thanks, random singing people.

Speaker 9 So be like Dave this holiday and give the gift of play.

Speaker 11 Scratchers from the California lottery. A little play can make your day.

Speaker 13 Please play responsibly. Must be 18 years or older to purchase play or claim.

Speaker 16 This holiday season, millions of families will pack their bags, load up the car, and head off for a family vacation. But not every trip is going to be somewhere fun.

Speaker 16 The American Red Cross responds to about 7,000 emergencies during the holiday season alone, from home fires to natural disasters. providing families a safe place to go when the unthinkable happens.

Speaker 16 But they can't do it without your support. Please donate at redcross.org.

Speaker 1 Now, aside from Monteverde, where else have archaeologists uncovered evidence for humans in South America from more than 10,000 years ago?

Speaker 1 And you know, I've got one particular site in mind, but if you're happy to mention a few others, that's absolutely fine too.

Speaker 17 There's several sites that date around 12,000, 13,000 years ago up and down the continent that

Speaker 17 provide solid evidence, and other sites are rejected or questioned. But one site is on the Pampa, Argentina, grasslands of Argentina, called Arroyo Seco.

Speaker 17 It dates about 14,000 years ago, excavated by Gustavo Polites, Argentinian archaeologist. Couple of sites in eastern Brazil hovering around maybe 13,000, 13,500 years ago.

Speaker 17 There's some sites up north in Colombia and Peru, Ecuador,

Speaker 17 maybe 13,800 years ago.

Speaker 17 And on the coast of northern Peru in the desert, Huacapieta, where I excavated with a colleague of mine, Ducho Bonavilla, Peruvian Italian, and that dated around 14,500 years ago, maybe a little older.

Speaker 17 And what it is, is a remnant terrace of the late Pleistocene, nearly 100,000 years ago, ago, that looks like a pitch of two soccer fields that are elevated up some five to six meters and sitting right on the ocean today.

Speaker 17 Back then, they would have been about 15 kilometers from the ocean because the sea lanes were down. But we found there

Speaker 17 shark bones, big sharks, three meters long. I don't know how they killed them or captured them with large stone flakes that were seven, eight to 15 centimeters across, used for cutting.

Speaker 17 Preservation is not as good as Monte Verde. We found some seaweed there as well, in addition to collecting marine resources, shellfish, they're fishing as well.

Speaker 17 And the environment at that time would have been a grassland, not a desert. Today it's a desert.
But between that site and the ocean, there were a number of estuaries and inlets.

Speaker 17 of brackish water and probably fish and sharks with high tide were coming in and we think there is how they're capturing the fish and maybe killing the sharks as well.

Speaker 17 Even today, in certain areas along the north coast of Peru, there's still people who use that technique. They wait until high tide.
Here comes the high tide, washing with the fish.

Speaker 17 They get caught in small sharks too, in low areas. So the people go out and club them today with baseball bats and, you know, club them to death, take them off and eat them.

Speaker 1 Wow. Okay.
Very different sides of Monteverde. And as you say, so this is in a desert environment, is it?

Speaker 17 In a desert environment. Back then, it would have been a kind of a dry grassland environment, but those people were mainly exploiting the ocean, not the terrestrial resources.

Speaker 1 How interesting. So very different to Monteverde.
I've got in my notes, though, earliest evidence of avocado question mark. Now, is this a red herring, but is this also related to the site?

Speaker 17 Yeah, what we found later, not at 14,500, but but around 10,800 years ago at Huacapieta in the later levels, still foragers, maritime foragers, terrestrial foragers, we found evidence of avocado, squash, and chili pepper, all three dating about 10,500 years ago.

Speaker 17 And probably all three are non-domesticated, wild, okay? So this is indicating again, same with the case with Monte Berni. We're not just talking about people hunting big game.

Speaker 17 In this sense, it'd be sharks. We actually found one whale bone, too, whale that was probably washed up on shore.
It happens today. People butchered it and consumed it.

Speaker 17 That was in the levels of 14,000 years ago. But these people are exploiting a wide range of resources.
You know, it's like they have a supermarket out there.

Speaker 17 They go into it and they're eating anything they can get their hands on.

Speaker 1 I mean, that is absolutely extraordinary. And I guess sites like this, are they really adding so much color to the nature of these early communities?

Speaker 1 The term hunter-gatherers is always thrown about for pre-farming communities.

Speaker 1 I mean, how would you define these early communities in South America from archaeological work at places like Huacaprieta and Monte Verde?

Speaker 17 Yeah, you can throw in a number of sites from Colombia, Brazil, again, Argentina, and other places.

Speaker 17 What it is indicating very early on is that these people exploited a very wide variety of not only edible plants and, of course, animals large and small, but also fishing, shellfish collecting, and collecting medicinal plants.

Speaker 17 I mean, let's face it, they're humans with health problems out there learning what is in that environment and exploiting it probably effectively and efficiently, and adapting, as we talked about before, their technology to these different and differing situations.

Speaker 17 They're a lot more acute and astute than we think they are. You know, they're just not simple mobile hunters and gatherers on the move.

Speaker 17 But in working these sites, you gain a real appreciation for the intelligence and intuition of these people.

Speaker 1 And that reminds me of something that I chatted to David about, and David mentioned, which I think really is worth repeating now, is as those first humans are, let's say, emerging into North America and what is today the United States of America, beyond the ice sheets, how this brave new world, brand new world, new habitats, and they're experimenting.

Speaker 1 They're having to find out what plants are edible, what aren't, and you know, that's always going on.

Speaker 1 And I'm guessing that's exactly the same with the great diversity of habitats as those people go down to South America.

Speaker 1 The amount of trial and error, so to speak, of figuring out what plants you can eat, what you can't, what marine resources are available, what animal resources are available, habitats, that would have taken so much time.

Speaker 1 And it's another extraordinary part of the story.

Speaker 17 Oh, absolutely. That's why I say they have intimate knowledge of that environment.
And as you say, probably a lot of it was trial and error as well.

Speaker 17 We found an interesting plant at Monte Ber, they called Drosera sp. That's just a scientific name.
And it comes from the steppes of Argentina, the other side of the Andes.

Speaker 17 And it's very toxic and poisonous. And today, the indigenous people have to masticate it and spit it out, let it dry in the sun, and

Speaker 17 it can become potentially a medicinal element. But that indicated to me, and it always stuck in my mind, okay, they brought that plant back to Monte Berle.

Speaker 17 Did they learn how to use it from groups in Argentina? Did they try to use it? Was somebody sick from it? Did they abandon that plant?

Speaker 17 And it gets to the very point of trial and error with anything out there in the environment.

Speaker 17 And one point I'll make here is I work with the local Mapuche, indigenous people, and I talk with the shamans down there who are healers and ritual people and so forth.

Speaker 17 And the shamans, I asked them the same question.

Speaker 17 How did you learn about the plants, the edibles and the medicinals? They said, we learned it from the animals. We watched what they eat and then we tried it out.

Speaker 1 So we've had a look at Monteverde and Huaca Prieta and this incredible archaeological material that you have surviving.

Speaker 1 I'm really glad we got you on the podcast now because because it's an exciting time.

Speaker 1 This is a difficult question, but with the current archaeological material available, what is our best guess about the nature as to how humans populated South America?

Speaker 1 Would you think predominantly Pacific Coast or what do we think?

Speaker 17 Good question. I've always thought that there were multiple avenues into South America.
First, you have to think about the Panamanian Isthmus. It's very narrow.

Speaker 17 As you come out of southern Panama, the Dean Forest into Colombia, that's the bridge into South America. And they could have come along the Pacific coast.

Speaker 17 They could have come along the Atlantic coast or just over land or a mixture of those. You know, the peopling of South America is there's two theories.

Speaker 17 One, they came along the waterway, the Pacific, but you have to throw it in the Atlantic as well, that side. And by land.
So I'm a believer in multiple pathways.

Speaker 17 You know, it could be any or all of those.

Speaker 1 Well, it's very exciting therefore for the future as more archaeological work is done by yourself and many colleagues both in North America and absolutely in South America too.

Speaker 1 I must admit, I knew next to nothing about Monteverde. I'd never heard of Huacaprieta before before looking at your research, Tom.
So this has been eye-opening for me.

Speaker 1 How big a task is it to get this knowledge out into the world about prehistoric South America and the populating of South America?

Speaker 17 It's been difficult, not only for me in some ways, but colleagues. I mean, South American colleagues, for their data to be evaluated and eventually accepted, much of it has to be published in English.

Speaker 17 There's a certain degree of

Speaker 17 what I call academic imperialism that still operates in the world.

Speaker 17 where there seems to be this notion of, well, first of all, not a lot of North Americans read Portuguese or Spanish, so they're going to have to read things in English.

Speaker 17 But I think that it's a discipline that's growing very quickly. It's one of the hot topics in anthropology.

Speaker 17 And getting this information out, archaeology, as I've hinted at, and as you well know, is a discipline that requires a lot of interdisciplinary research. and a lot of resources.

Speaker 17 But these sites are not easy to find either. Monte Berde found me.
I didn't find Monte Berdi. It came to me vis-a-vis this student.
And a lot of sites are like that.

Speaker 17 Farmers and fishermen find sites and so forth.

Speaker 17 But I think there needs to be, and I say that, more systematic archaeological survey and reconnaissance by archaeologists out across well-defined paleo landscapes.

Speaker 17 When we look out there at that landscape, as you alluded to earlier, That is very different in the past 12,000, 14,000, 15,000 years or more ago than it is today.

Speaker 17 And we need to learn that landscape and learn how to research it. But, you know, times are exciting.
There's more interdisciplinary data coming into view. Genetics is exciting.

Speaker 17 New techniques with LIDAR technology.

Speaker 1 That's penetrating beneath the thick tree cover, isn't it, LIDAR, Tom?

Speaker 17 Yeah, exactly. And you get a better reading of what the landscape was like, in addition to the archaeology.

Speaker 17 So I encourage young people to go into any discipline that relates to this theme, or archaeology in general.

Speaker 1 Well, Tom, that's a lovely way for us to finish this episode. It just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today.

Speaker 17 I enjoyed it a great deal. Thank you.

Speaker 1 Well, there you go. There was Dr.
Tom Dillahay talking through the archaeology surrounding the first evidence for humans in South America and why it's such an exciting area of archaeology right now.

Speaker 1 And really exciting discoveries, no doubt, will be coming out of South America in the years ahead. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Ancients.

Speaker 1 Please follow this show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us, and you'll be doing us a big favor.

Speaker 1 Don't forget, you can also listen to us and all of History Hit's podcasts at free, and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com/slash subscribe.

Speaker 1 That's enough from me, and I will see you in the next episode.

Speaker 14 When you're a forward thinker, you don't just bring your A game, you bring your AI game.

Speaker 14 Workday is the AI platform that transforms the way you manage your people, money, and agents so you can transform tomorrow. Workday, moving business forever forward.

Speaker 3 Dashing through the store, Dave's looking for a gift.

Speaker 2 One you can't ignore, but not the socks he picks.

Speaker 3 I know, I'm putting them back.

Speaker 4 Hey, Dave, here's a tip.

Speaker 5 Put scratchers on your list.

Speaker 6 Oh, scratchers, Good idea.

Speaker 7 It's an easy shopping trip.

Speaker 3 We're glad we could assist.

Speaker 8 Thanks, random singing people.

Speaker 10 So be like Dave this holiday and give the gift of play.

Speaker 11 Scratchers from the California lottery. A little play can make your day.

Speaker 13 Please play responsibly. Must be 18 years or older to purchase play or claim.