The Incredible Human Journey

by Alice Roberts

  Over the decades, several sites in South America with apparently pre-Clovis dates have risen to fame, and then been knocked down, as the bastions of ‘Clovis first’ have picked holes in their archaeological procedures or dating methods. But there is one site in particular that has stood up to scientific scrutiny: Monte Verde in Chile.

  On my way to the Amazon, and Pedra Pintada, I stopped off in Rio, where one of the oldest skulls in the Americas is kept in a box in the museum.

  Meeting Luzia: Rio, Brazil

  Upstairs, Rio Museum was like a palace that someone has forgotten to look after. The high ceilings were falling down, exposing beams and lath, and the paint was peeling on the stuccoed pilasters. Most of the huge rooms were divided into offices and corridors by the careful arrangement of filing cabinets and cupboards to form party walls.

  In a large, dusty room somewhere in one corner of the museum, empty but for a huge wooden table, Walter Neves set down a metal case. He sprung the locks and carefully opened the lid. Inside was an almost complete skull. He lifted it out and set it down on a ring-doughnut-shaped piece of foam on the table. I was looking at the face – albeit the skeletal face – of an ancient American.

  This was just one of the skulls found in the cave of Sumidouro (meaning swallet or sinkhole) in Lagoa Santa, in Brazil, in the nineteenth century. The Danish naturalist Peter Lund had discovered the human remains in association with the fossilised bones of megafauna, and had therefore proposed that people had been in the Americas at the same time that the giant beasts were around. This was long before any Clovis sites were discovered in North America, and Lund’s contemporaries found it impossible to accept his assertions about the antiquity of those bones. But archaeologists returning to the caves in the twentieth century found more human skeletons, in the same layers as megafauna. In the 1970s, a skeleton was excavated from sediments that contained charcoal. Radiocarbon dating of this charcoal showed the skeleton to date back to the end of the Pleistocene, around 13,000 years ago. Lund was at last vindicated.1 The skeleton became known as ‘Luzia’ – and it was Luzia’s skull that Walter Neves had placed on the table before me.

  ‘I am proud to introduce you to Luzia,’ said Walter.

  ‘She is probably the oldest human skeleton ever found in the Americas. And what I realised back in 1989 was that the morphology of these skulls of the first Americans was very, very different from the skulls of nowadays Native Americans.’

  It was an odd looking skull. It didn’t really look Asian. Everything I’d found out so far about the origin of the first Americans pointed to a homeland in East Asia – but this skull didn’t appear to have much in common with modern East Asians. I said so.

  ‘No, and it’s not just this skull,’ said Walter. ‘We have recently published a paper with eighty skulls from Lagoa Santa and also like seventy skulls from Colombia and they all show the same trends.’

  I knew the paper. It was the biggest sample of early American skulls that had ever been studied. After taking a suite of measurements from the Lagoa Santa skulls, Walter had then compared this data with Howell’s database of measurements from more than 2500 skulls from around the world. He had used powerful multivariate statistics – that allow many different measurements to be compared all at the same time – to look at how close the early Brazilian skulls were to crania from other populations. And the results showed that the Lagoa Santa skulls were closer to Australians, Pacific Islanders and even Africans than they were to north-east Asians or modern Native Americans.2

  Present-day Native Americans have a similar skull shape to modern north-eastern Asians: the braincase is short and wide, the face is broad and wide, with very little protrusion of the jaw, the nasal opening is high and narrow and the eye sockets are roundish. In contrast, Luzia’s skull was long and narrow, with a quite pronounced, projecting jaw, and broad, rectangular eye sockets and a wide nasal opening – more like Australians, Melanesians and sub-Saharan Africans.

  But how does this fit with the idea of early Americans coming from north-east Asia, through Beringia, into the Americas? Could it even be taken to suggest a trans-Pacific crossing from Australo-Melanesia to South America? Walter was quick to dismiss this idea.

  ‘We never suggested that. We never thought that,’ he said firmly. ‘If you go and see the few human skeletons of the final Pleistocene in Asia they also look like this – not like today’s East Asians. So these populations showing Australo-Melanesian, or even an African morphology, they were in East Asia by the final Pleistocene. So we have no doubt that Luzia’s people also came from Asia using the Bering Strait as the entry to the Americas.’

  He thought his results were entirely compatible with a colonisation of the Americas from the north, but that the early Americans were much more morphologically diverse than Native Americans are today, and included a lot of people – like Luzia – who didn’t look at all East Asian.

  Walter’s argument was that these Brazilian skulls suggested that a model of just one population expansion into the Americas was too simple. He advocated that some people had come into the Americas before what we know as typical East Asian features had developed, or at least while there was a more diverse range of morphologies in East Asia: with more people who still looked like the original beachcombers. I was reminded of the Upper Cave skulls from Zhoukoudian: they also lacked classic ‘East Asian’ features.3 Then, according to Walter, there was a later arrival of people with faces more like modern East Asians and Native Americans. Other physical anthropologists looking at skull shape have also found evidence for a two-wave colonisation of the Americas. Marta Lahr, of Cambridge University, found that skull shapes of modern Native Americans were similar to those of East Asians, but that skulls from archaeological populations from Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia showed a more ‘generalised morphology’.4 In 1996, a skeleton was discovered in Kennewick, Washington State. The skull was dated to about 9300 years old, and also appeared to be closer in shape to the Ainu of Japan and to Pacific Ocean islanders than to Native Americans.

  Walter was aware that this idea of two migrations into the Americas didn’t fit with the single migration revealed by genetics,5 but he suggested that this discrepancy could be explained if some of the original genetic lineages have been lost, just as people who looked like Luzia had disappeared over time.1, 2

  Combining the fossil and genetic data, Stephen Oppenheimer has suggested that there might have been three genetically, morphologically and culturally distinct populations that moved from Beringia into the Americas. This harks back to that idea of Beringia as a staging post, with various, different-looking populations originating in various parts of Asia moving in, and then expanding into the Americas. Oppenheimer’s three populations include a group descended from the original beachcombers of Asia (these would be robust people like Luzia); a group connected with later ‘East Asian’-looking people; and another group from the Russian Altai (refugees moving east from Siberia during the peak of the Ice Age, and sharing the mitochondrial X lineage with northern Europeans, descendants of westward-moving refugees).6

  But whether or not these two (or three) morphologically, and perhaps culturally, distinct populations came down into the Americas at the same time, or in different waves, is currently very difficult to pin down. If these populations all flowed into America at the same time, this does not seem to explain why none of those early Americans (or, at least, the ones discovered to date, including Luzia and Kennewick Man) look ‘East Asian’.

  But recently a large study of more than five hundred skulls from late Ice Age America all the way to the present, including skulls from Lagoa Santa, suggested a synthesis between the genetic single-wave model and Walter’s ‘Two-Components’ model. The researchers proposed an initial wave of colonisation, by a variable population from Siberia and Beringia, where East Asian and robust, palaeoamerican types like Luzia formed opposite ends of a continuous spectrum of variation. After colonisation, the northern, circumarctic groups then maintained
continuous contact, allowing diffusion of that extreme north-east Asian morphology with facial flatness and projection of the cheekbones to America. This could explain the similarity between Siberian and Aleut-Eskimos.7

  Some anthropologists urge caution over reconstructing past migrations based on craniofacial shape: European Upper Palaeolithic skulls appear closer to non-European skulls in Howell’s database than to modern European skulls, despite the genetic indications that most modern Europeans are descended from Upper Palaeolithic populations. It seems that, all over the world, skull and face shapes have changed a lot since the first colonisers arrived in the various continents.8

  What is clear, though, is that there is no longer anyone looking like Luzia in the Americas today. Stephen Oppenheimer has suggested that the Olmec statues have this ‘African’ look, indicating that there may still have been people of this type living 3000 years ago. Walter Neves suspected that the ultimate disappearance of this robust type may have been fairly recent – perhaps even since European contact with the New World. He showed me a reconstruction of Luzia that had been made by forensic artist Richard Neaves. As Luzia had a projecting jaw, he had given her broad lips. In the flesh she certainly looked much more African than East Asian.

  It is clear that there are quite a few different opinions and different explanations for the variation seen in the early palaeoindians, compared with Native Americans today. I imagine the picture will get clearer and some kind of consensus will emerge as more fossils and artefacts are found, and more genes analysed. The complete story of the first Americans has yet to emerge.

  Ancient Hunter-Gatherers in the Amazon Forest:

  Pedra Pintada, Brazil

  From Rio I flew north-east – to the Amazon. I was bound for an archaeological site that held information about how the early Brazilians had lived.

  We flew over the lower reaches of that largest of rivers, which broke into skeins of water that meandered and reunited, and over vast stretches of forest, to land at a small airstrip at Santarém. I alighted from the plane into a warm breeze. Clouds of lemon-yellow butterflies were streaming across the runway, flying with the wind.

  From Santarém I caught a ferry to Monte Alegre (pronounced by the locals as ‘monchalegray’). The trip took around five hours, and, like all the other passengers, I bought myself a hammock to hang up on the double-decked ferry. By the time we were ready to leave the quayside in Santarém, the decks were festooned with a bright rainbow of hammocks: stripy, checked, fringed, and embroidered. By mid-afternoon just about everyone was tucked up in their hammocks, gently swaying with the motion of the boat, in the shade, out of the dazzling glare of the overhead sun.

  Arriving at Monte Alegre close to sunset, I was met by Nelsi Sadeck as I got off the ferry, still swaying slightly. The next morning, we set off from the small town on a road which quickly turned into a dusty, rutted track. We were heading for Pedra Pintada, the ‘Painted Rock’. Nelsi was a local guide, and had dug at Pedra Pintada for archaeologist Anna Roosevelt, of the University of Illinois, who had run excavations at the site during the early nineties.

  Throughout South America, stone tools, including triangular points, have been found which are quite distinct from the North American complexes. Most of them are undated, so it’s hard to know how they fit into the story of the colonisation of the Americas. Some such points had been discovered in the lower Amazon region: very different from fluted Clovis points, these were long and thin, with downturned ‘wings’ and a stem for attachment to a shaft. Other archaeologists had assumed them to be Holocene, made some time in the last 10,000 years. But Anna Roosevelt wanted to pin down their age. In order to do this, she needed to find a site where the archaeological layers were well preserved: it was no good just looking at surface finds. Cave sites seemed ideal – there was a good chance that early sediments would have been preserved intact – and Anna knew that there were lots of caves and rockshelters in the sandstone outcrops around Monte Alegre. Roosevelt’s team began their investigations by surveying these caves, mapping them and testing the deposits inside using an auger to remove cores of sediment for inspection.1

  I was expecting to be venturing deep into the rainforest, but in fact the landscape around Monte Alegre was dominated by low-level woodland and shrubby pastureland, where skinny white cows and horses grazed. Nelsi and I rattled along in the Toyota Land Cruiser, stopping to machete back fallen trees on the track, and eventually coming to a halt at the base of a large outcrop. Nelsi led me up the slope to see a painted rockshelter, called ‘El Painel’. There were strange, abstract shapes, some looking like animal forms, one like a woman giving birth. There were also geometric patterns, and handprints, all in red and yellow ochre. Up on the rocky outcrop, looking down on the Amazon, I could still see those yellow butterflies on their journey, with the wind. And, high above us, black vultures circled.

  Then we went on to the Caverna da Pedra Pintada itself. We walked through a narrow cleft, which was open at the top, with tree roots hanging down like lianas inside the cave. There were bats roosting high above us, on an overhang. I pointed them out.

  ‘Yes … vampire bats,’ said Nelsi.

  There were also peculiar, long-bodied wasps flying in and out of small nests, suspended by papery stalks from the walls of the cave. I proceeded with caution. We scrambled down into the main cave, which opened into a wide mouth. We were looking down on to the Amazon flood plain. On the walls were more paintings in red ochre.

  The augured samples from Pedra Pintada suggested that the archaeology in the cave was undisturbed, and, in the early 1990s, the archaeologists had started to excavate.

  ‘This is where we dug in ’91,’92 and ’93,’ explained Nelsi, gesturing to the floor of the cave entrance. ‘We excavated down to two metres.’

  There were plenty of remains in the more recent, shallower layers, and then the archaeologists found a ‘sterile’ layer of sediment – containing no archaeological finds. But below that there was a deep layer full of animal bones, shells, burnt plant remains, stone tools – and pieces of ochre: traces of the earliest inhabitants of the cave. Among the thousands of stone flakes, there were twenty-four finished stone tools, including stemmed, triangular points made from quartz-like chalcedony, that may have been used as spear or harpoon points. There were bones from amphibians, tortoises and turtles, snakes and mammals – but most of the bones were from freshwater fish. The archaeologists found further evidence of the dietary breadth of the ancient Amazonians from plant remains: there were fragments of burnt wood but also fruits and seeds from forest trees like jutai, achua, brazil nut and various palms, that still grow in the Amazon rainforest today. Radiocarbon dating of the carbonised plant, as well as luminescence dating of burnt stone tools and sediment, placed the early occupation of the cave at around 13,000 years ago.1, 2

  Intriguingly, the chunks of ochre found in the archaeological layers were similar in colour and chemical composition to the pigment in the paintings on the wall of the cave. It’s impossible to know for sure, but those paintings could have been made by the palaeoindian cave-dwellers 13,000 years ago.

  Some scholars have argued that the rainforests of Central and South America would have constituted an ecological barrier to colonisation by palaeoindians (a strange contention really, given that we know people were living in the rainforest at Niah at least 40,000 years ago, and probably much earlier). And Pedra Pintada definitively demonstrates that this is a misconception: palaeoindians were happily living in the late Pleistocene rainforest.3

  The further importance of Pedra Pintada to theories of the colonisation of the Americas is that it demonstrates that there were people living in the Amazon Basin at the same time as (or possibly earlier than) Clovis people in the plains of North America, but more than 5000 miles to the south.1 As these two cultures were contemporary, this is clearly a problem for the ‘Clovis first’ theory. There must have been people in the Americas before Clovis. Long before Clovis, in fact, as my last destinat
ion would prove.

  I caught the boat back to Santarém, and made my way to the airport, where clouds of lemon-yellow butterflies were still streaming across the runway. Then I left the tropical warmth of Brazil behind me as I headed south, to Chile in mid-winter.

  Black Soil and Revelations: Monte Verde, Chile

  It was quite a shock stepping off the plane in Chile, into a grey, chilly winter’s day. I was a long way from the vibrant colours and warmth of the tropics, and I was back on the Pacific coast.

  It was so cloudy when I arrived in the small city of Puerto Montt that I couldn’t see the amazing setting I was in: a landscape of lakes and volcanoes. Later, when the clouds lifted, I started to make out the snowy slopes of Osorno and Calbuco in the distance.

  My impression of Chile over the days I was there was of almost unremitting dampness. It poured with rain most of the time. Lichen and moss grew on the wooden boards and shingles of houses in the villages I drove through, and the bare trees were swathed in moss. It was apt; the archaeological site I was investigating was special because of its very wetness.

  My first visit was not to the site of Monte Verde itself, but to Valdivia University, up the coast, where some of the marvellous artefacts from the excavations were stored. A long, low wooden building there was a repository for a huge range of objects from ancient archaeological specimens to historical artefacts. There were shelves of beautiful painted pots, clay animals, teapots, and a Madonna whose detached hands lay on the pedestal at her feet. The curator cleared a space on a table, and brought out Tupperware boxes full of Monte Verde treasures. As the archaeological site was waterlogged (a damp peat bog), all sorts of materials have been preserved that would normally rot away quickly in the ground. Instead of ‘postholes’, where darkened soil shows archaeologists that wooden stakes were once planted in the ground, the stakes themselves were preserved. And there were wooden spikes that looked a lot like tent pegs. I examined a block of wood with a cut-down hole that had been drilled down – perhaps by twisting a stick to make fire. There was also string – unmistakable, twined-together fibres. And there was a piece of thick, darkened animal hide, perhaps from mastodon or mammoth. All these organic finds were discovered alongside more standard archaeological fare such as stone tools and animal bones. As I was inspecting these precious objects, Mario Piño arrived. Mario was a geologist who had worked on the excavation at Monte Verde, and he was to be my guide to the site itself.