Florentino Ameghino, had, during the late 1800s found crude stone tools (eoliths), and remains of baked clay in deep, ancient sedimentary layers along the steep banks of some rivers, and the coastline, in Buenos Aires province, Argentina. He attributed them to a locally evolved, Pampean hominin from the Tertiary period, that evolved into modern humans and then peopled the World (see this post about it). This was controversial and attacked by U.S. scholars who supported a later peopling of America ~3,000 years BP and, surely not older than 10,000 years ago. They attributed the tools, and bones found by Ameghino to Holocene Native Americans, and the baked earth to volcanic activity (the earth had been cooked at temperatures of around 1,000 °C (1,850°F).
In a recent post I mentioned that the Pampas in Argentina was an ideal spot to look for Denisovans or Homo erectus in America. One year ago I mentioned relatively old human footsteps on the Atlantic coastline of Buenos Aires, at Claromecó, 30,000 years old.
Miramar Bolas
When Florentino Ameghino died in 1911, his brother Carlos, who had always worked on the field, searching for fossils and ancient tools for Florentino, continued the work of his brother and visited some sites along the coast of Buenos Aires. He was sponsored by the museums of La Plata, and Natural History of Buenos Aires, finding tools in sediments belonging to the Chapadmalense layer, a Pliocene formation roughly 2 or 3 million years old. Named after a coastal area between Miramar and Mar del Plata, on the seabord of Buenos Aires.
Among the tools reported by Carlos Ameghino, were some spherical "bolas" (balls) on the seaside cliffs in Miramar, province of Buenos Aires, Argentina (Google map), which were of a Late Miocene age! Pictured below, they were made from bone (Source).
Below is an image with some of the tools recovered in Miramar by Carlos Ameghino (Bonomo, 2022):
Bolas
Bolas (also known as "Boleadoras") were used by historic Natives in the pampas to hunt animals, and kill their enemies. There were different types of bolas, but the principle was the same. They were stones balls sheathed with leather and attached to strong tendon straps that were whirled above the head to gain momentum and then thrown so as to entangle around the hunted animal’s legs. Bolas could have one ball (bola perdida or "lost Ball"), something like a single sling shot that goes off, stone and sling. Or two or more balls tied with individual cords to a knot. These were used to hung rheas (South American ostriches), deer, guanacos (a wild relative of the llama), and other smaller animals. They were deadly. Ancient bolas were carefully crafted in hard stone, and grooved along their midline to attach the sinew there. Later historical natives were not as skilful as their paleoindian ancestors and made them from softer soapstone. Below is an image from Musters journey (1869-70) in Patagonia, showing a Tehuelche native using bolas on horseback.
Controversy and Rejection
The Miramar findings were disputed by Antonio Romero, 1918: "the artifacts, similar to classic Neolithic types, found at Brusquitas and attributed to a human being already existing in the Miocene period, are a fallacious supposition, whose audacity surpasses even the famous discovery of the California skull by Blake and Widney. The being that made fire and cracked pebbles in a crude and rudimentary way at the end of the Late Miocene (Puelche and Chapalmal), according to F. Ameghino, was not a human being but a remotely distant precursor of humankind."
Romero claimed that the tools were recent and the work of historic "Indians" which were dragged or moved into older sediments due to erosion on the cliff. Adding that ancient fossils were removed by the sea, eroded from older layers and redeposited in more recent ones. The cliff wasn't made of ancient Chapadmalal sediments, but more recent ones. That the baked earth (which Ameghino attributed to coarse ceramics made by ancient hominins) were the outcome of natural fires that burned the dry grasslands and cooked the clay in the soil.
Vignatti, 1919, on the other hand, defended Ameghino, and cited the conclusions reached by the auditing committee sent to inspect the site in 1915, composed of experts (Santiago Roth, Walther Schiller, Lutz Witte, M. Kantor, L. M. Torres, and Carlos Ameghino, the brother of Florentino). Their affidavit says that "the visual inspection of the site where the aforementioned artifacts were found has not given cause to suppose that they were buried under one circumstance or another at a time subsequent to the formation of the layer; that they were in their original position and that, therefore, they should be considered as objects of human manufacture, contemporary to the geological floor in which they were found deposited." This means that they were of the same age as the sediments in which they were found, from the Chapadmalense, and didn't slip down into it from more recent layers. Furthermore, the committee (Source) saw a bola-shaped stone unearthed in their presence, from the cliff, in the same layer that other bolas had been found. A flint knife was also retrieved as well as a flat stone like the ones used by the historic natives to make fire. Finally, fossil remains of a ground sloth (Gravigradae) were discovered, associated to a round stone.
However, a renown geologist Frenguelli in 1920 revised the stratigraphy and dating of the cliff, and assigned an Early Pleistocene age to the layers that Ameghino had thought were Miocene (source).
In 1924, Frenguelli and Outes dig in Miramar and ratify that the sediments are not Tertiary, but from the Quaternary. They found a bola with an equatorial groove, roughly 6.5 cm (2.5") diameter made of white quartzite weighing 340 g (0.75 lbs). They attribute it to a "Mousterian" appearance and add that the bola was firmly buried in the soil. Both authors conclude that: "The polished projectiles ("balls"), clearly defined, coexisted with industrial artifacts that morphologically represent all periods of the Early and Middle Pleistocene. They point out, then, that the discovery of "balls" in ancient sediments should not surprise any specialist, since their presence had already been noted in Europe by one of the most distinguished forerunners of archaeology, Boucher de Perthes, who recalled that "European Pleistocene balls" appeared mostly in Mousterian sites."
Hoax?
Some authors even suggested that Lorenzo Parodi, a local amateur archaeologist who helped Carlos Ameghino in collecting and finding fossils, was the author of a hoax. He placed recent objects in ancient sediments and then "discovered" them by "chance" (see Tonni, 2016). Below is a photograph of a bola in Tertiary sediments in Miramar, from that same source:
Too polished and well finished to be so old
Vignatti, 1941 included an image of polished stone bolas from the Chapadmalense sediments. As you can see in the image below, they are neat, polished, and quite different from the coarse knapped flint knives found close to them. He states that these supposedly ancient bolas are hard to tell apart from those used by contemporary Pampas gauchos (local "cowboys") and historic Indians. Yet he did not dispute their antiquity.
The coarse vs. polished finish had been brought up in 1924, questioning the bolas and tools unearthed by Frenguelli and Outes: "many specialists harbor suspicions. This suspicion arises from the coexistence, at such ancient levels, of carved stone objects with polished ones characteristic of more recent cultures. Outes and Frenguelli state that they do not share these scruples, as the Stone Age in Argentina has not yet been systematically studied, primarily from stratigraphic and technological perspectives. The authors believe that, to date, it can only be stated, and even then only relatively, that "the peoples most closely linked to the matter under discussion manufactured a large number of Paleolithic stone tools and weapons, and, exceptionally, a limited group of polished stone tools.""
As I will discuss in my next post, stone balls were common around the Old World, and found in very ancient sites, together with Oldowan tools, the oldest tool-making technology used by our hominin ancestors. Though coarse, the African and Eurasian stone balls are the work of H. erectus, and possibly Neanderthals. They are uncommon in more recent humans, and were only used as boleadoras in South-central Argentina by historic natives, and their ancestors, the paleoindians. Could they have been brought here by Old World hominins, to the cul-de-sac at the end of the Americas, the point that is furthest from Africa, where it was adopted by the later waves of modern humans?
Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall ©
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