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.
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 years9 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 clay-lined, 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 coresearchers 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 pre-human 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 Palaeoindians along the Amazon confirms earlier evidence that the Palaeoindian radiation was more complex than current theories provide for.31
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