The Kofkeche

My previous post explored the genetics of Southern Patagonia. It mentions final migratory wave that finalized around 2,000 years ago. I mentioned evidence supporting the movement of people of Amazonian origin into what is now Argentina, and then, across the Andes into Chile.

I also mentioned the possibility that the Mapuche people were latecomers to the region.

In today's post I will mention the people that the Mapuche displaced.

Kofkeche, the bread people

It is an interesting fact that the island of Chiloé and the Arauco region, home of the Trauco dwarf, were also the home of a branch of the Mapuche people, the “Huilliche” group (southern people).

Before the arrival of the Spaniards, pushed by the other Mapuche groups in Central Chile, these Huilliche left their homeland in the Arauco and invaded Chiloé, where they displaced and absorbed the original Chono “boat people” who lived there.

They also brought along their beliefs, among which was the devilish Trauco. American naturalist, Dillman Samuel Bullock Lytle (1878-1971), excavated the Huilliche’s Arauco homeland during the mid-twentieth century and uncovered funerary urns that were different from those used by the Huilliche and whose size indicated a small race. An adult’s mummy, five hundred years old, recently found in Angol was barely 1.30 m tall (4 ft. .2 in.)

Kofkeche funerary urns. Source

These findings led Bullock to believe that the Mapuche (including the Huilliche) were not the area’s original inhabitants. He assumed that they had originated in the Argentine Pampas and then migrated to Chile. When they arrived there, they came across a race of “small people,” which he named Kofkeche.

Bullock’s archaeological proof and conjectures received corroboration from oral tradition; he uncovered a Mapuche legend that mentioned “small people” or “Kofkeche.” The Mapuche words kofke and che mean “bread” and “people.” They got that name because they were small like country loaves. Bullock also mentioned a story told by an old Mapuche woman named Cayetey Anteu, whose grandmother had told her that “when the first Mapuche arrived, there were people very different from them […] they were short and thick, somewhat fat, and the Mapuche called them Kofkeche.” (Source)

"Land of the Kofkeche" (Tierra de los Kofkeches). Source

Mapuche cosmogony also mentions the Kofkeche; they are evil, dwarfish creatures from an underworld that interact with ours. The Mapuche conceive the universe as a series of platforms piled upon each other in space; below our platform, where the humans live, is another level, the land of the dwarves. It is named Kofkeche Mapu or Laftrache Mapu (land of the tiny people).

Maybe the Kofkeche were related to the other groups of “small” (short statured) people inhabiting the Pacific Ocean coast northwards, into Perú (like the Chinchorro-Chango people), and lived in peace until their destruction by the invading Mapuche groups who migrated to Chile later on.

Argentine historian Rodolfo Casamiquela suspected that the Mapuche of the Arauco area were alluding to the Chono boat people “who are short,” and mentioned that in 1975 they still considered the Chubut natives as “short people, one meter tall [3 ft], who speak another language.”

In other words, the arrival of the Mapuche around 2000 years ago displaced and replaced the Kofkeche, Poya, and Chono people from the Lake District area in Chile's northern Patagonia, between the Bio Bio River and the Gulf of Ancud.

Poyas

The mysterious Poya people are mentioned by different early explorers, but little is known about them. They used canose, and lived by the lakes of this area, and may have been related to the Chonos. I will write about them in a future post.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2025 by Austin Whittall © 

The Genetics of Southern Patagonia

The genetics of the Southern Patagonian natives is more complex than expected. A paper published in Nature on Aug. 3, 2020 (Nakatsuka, N., Luisi, P., Motti, J.M.B. et al. Ancient genomes in South Patagonia reveal population movements associated with technological shifts and geography. Nat Commun 11, 3868 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-17656-w) explains the possible admixtures that led to the native populations in Tierra del Fuego and the Southern continental tip of Patagonia.

The authors noted that the natives that adapted to a seafaring life (marine adaptation) either "adopted the technology or invented it independently", they didn't find support that a there was a "large-scale immigration into South Patagonia of people from the north" who were already skilled in living off the sea.

Instead they found that a group of people came from the Northwest (along the Chilean Pacific Ocean coast) after the initial colonization event, around 5000 years ago (as characterized by the remains found at Ayayema ~4700 BP) these people had adopted a maritime economy and replaced the original people that had settled in this area. These latecomers:

"replac[ed] the lineages related to Punta Santa Ana (~6600 bp) and La Arcillosa2 (~5800 bp) that were previously established in South Patagonia itself. The arrival of this new stream of people could be related to the change in lithic technology between ~5500 and 3100 bp, characterized by the interruption of green obsidian use and the introduction of large biface projectile points in the Western Archipelago and Beagle Channel regions."

Archaeologists had noticed that green obsidian, a sharp volcanic glass that had been used in this region 6700 to 6300 years BP vanished, and later (5500 to 3100 BP) stone tools were made from other materials.

There was a simultaneous change in stone tools at that time.

The authors point out that "The disruption in green obsidian use has been hypothesized to reflect a loss of cultural knowledge about the location of the source of this raw material, potentially due to arrival of new people unfamiliar with the landscape."

There was another migration from the Chilean region, characterized by remains found in Central Chile. (Perhaps these people moved pushed by the migration that brought the Mapuche people into Chile?). This final group brought new genetic traits and spread between 4700 and 2000 BP. The authors wonder if the "shared linguistic family between North, Central, and South Patagonia groups in historical and modern times could be related to this signal." I assume they refer to the language of the tehuelche people, known as chon

Mapuche: Late Arrival

I have posted about the Mapuche-Guaraní link in the past. Now I have included more information on this matter in my book's second edition, a brief snippet is shown below:

Dillehay in 2007,(1) noting the similar cultural traits (ceramic, funeral practices), language similarities, and genetics, suggested an association between the Mapuche and the Amazonian natives.
A study published in 2022 analyzed ancient human DNA from the cement attaching head lice nits and found that they support a “major migration wave, occurring around 2,000 years BP from the ancient Proto Tupí/Tupí of the Amazonian lowlands (northwest Amazon) toward south Amazonia and the east Coast, spanning ∼4,000 km.”(2) The expansion continued across Argentina and reached the Andes.
This migration was probably caused by a growing population requiring new lands for farming or, as a response to a drier climate at that time. The authors concluded that “The three Calingasta [San Juan province, Argentina] ancient mummies analyzed in this study show for the first time that the original peoples of San Juan, Calingasta, came from Amazonia about 2,000 years BP… help[ing] decipher a piece of the puzzle of pre-Columbian ancient migrations within South America, of an impressive move spanning 5,000-6,500 km. [3,100-4,040 mi.]” Interestingly, Calingasta is only 160 km (100 mi.) to the east of the Mapuche homeland in Central Chile. Another study from 2023 pointed out that “the fact that together, regional varieties of Mapudungun [Mapuche language] still form a coherent single language is consistent with a relatively recent common origin, followed by geographical expansion and divergence over a timescale of the order of many centuries, but not millennia.”(3)

(1) Pedersen MW, Antunes C, De Cahsan B, et al., (2022). Ancient Human Genomes and Environmental DNA from the Cement Attaching 2,000-Year-Old Head Lice Nits. Molecular Biology and Evolution, Vol. 39, Issue 2, February 2022, msab351.
(2) Arango-Isaza E., Capodiferro MR., et al., (2023), The genetic history of the Southern Andes from present-day Mapuche ancestry. Current Biology, Vol 33:13, pp. 2602-2615.e5.
(3) Dillehay T.D. et al., (2007). Cultivated wetlands and emerging complexity in south-central Chile and long distance effects of climate change. Antiquity. 949–6.

The timing of this Out-Of-Amazon migration seems to coincide with the displacement of people into Patagonia from Central Chile

My next post will look into the Kofkeche myth, and its relation to the arrival of the Mapuche in Chile.

CAPTION HERE. Copyright © 2025 by Austin Whittall

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2025by Austin Whittall ©