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Guide to Patagonia's Monsters & Mysterious beings

I have written a book on this intriguing subject which has just been published.
In this blog I will post excerpts and other interesting texts on this fascinating subject.

Austin Whittall


Friday, October 18, 2019

Santa Elina: humans in Brazil 23,000 years ago


I cama across a paper Peopling South America's centre: the late Pleistocene site of Santa Elina, by Denis Vialou, Mohammed Benabdelhadi, James Feathers, Michel Fontugne and Agueda Vilhena Vialou (Antiquity, Volume 91, Issue 358, August 2017 , pp. 865-884) which reports about a site called Santa Elina in western Brazil which has evidence of human occupation some 23,000 years ago.


The paper states that "The crucial significance of Santa Elina for understanding the earliest period of known prehistoric settlement in South America lies in the close articulation of archaeological, palaeontological, sedimentological and chronological datasets from the site. Human presence is attested by: a) lithic materials manufactured on site with evidence of debitage and retouch; b) the bones of extinct megafauna (Glossotherium), partly brought into the shelter, and clearly associated with the lithics; and c) by hearth deposits identified throughout the sequence. The results from three complementary dating methods—14C, OSL (sediments) and U/Th (Glossotherium bones)—are in relative agreement with one another, and confirm the stratigraphic integrity of the depositional history at Santa Elina. The dates indicate two periods of human occupation, with a date of 23120±260 BP for the first, and a date of 10120±60 BP for the beginning of the second (Table 1). These dates confirm the association between archaeological artefacts and Glossotherium bones. Subsequent occupations terminated around 2000 BP."


This site is located roughly 50 miles (80 km) from the city of Cuaibá in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, close to South America's geographic center, and 1,000 miles from the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. Far from Beringia, and far older than any other site.


Ornaments with holes on the ends, made from extinct sloth osteoderms. from Santa Elina site

How did humans reach central Brazil 23,000 years ago? Perhaps they arrived even earlier. They resettled the cave a second time some 10,000 years ago. Two separate events. Archeologists Agueda Vilhena Vialou and her husband Denis Vialou don't make any conjectures, they just state teir findings and facts. It is a pity that no human bones have been found at the site, to allow us to investigate the matter further.



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