The ~25,000-year-old Santa Elina Site in Brazil

Santa Elina is an archaeological site located deep inland, roughly 100 km (60 mi.) from Cuaiba, the capital of the state of Mato Grosso, Brazil, close to the border with Bolivia (see Google map) it is a rock shelter that has provided evidence of human presence there 25,000 years ago, or more.

See: Vialou D, Benabdelhadi M, Feathers J, Fontugne M, Vialou AV. Peopling South America’s centre: the late Pleistocene site of Santa Elina. Antiquity. 2017;91(358):865-884. doi:10.15184/aqy.2017.101

Having mentioned in a previous post the recent article that suggests a recent (4-8 ky) age for the Monte Verde site in Chile, which had been dated to 18.5 ky, I am glad that there are many more older sites in America that suggest an early date for human colonization.

Early and distant Population

It is located far from the Atlantic and Pacific coastal routes, deep inside Brazil, in an area south of the Amazon forest, yet covered with thick jungles. It is near the Cuaiba River, which forms part of the Paraná-Río de la Plata Basin, and could have helped people move through the region.

Excavations began here in 1984 and yielded remains of a giant sloth (Glossotherium) whose bone osteoderms (that formed part of its thick protective hide) have been dated to 27,000 ±2000 years ago. Charcoal remains have also been dated to 23,120±260 years ago.

There have been later occupations (~9,000 to 10,000 years ago), with more tools, ornaments, and sloth remains. Researchers conclude that: " 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. These dates confirm the association between archaeological artefacts and Glossotherium bones. Subsequent occupations terminated around 2000 BP.!

Figure 1. Location and general view of the study area. (a) General location of the site (base map adapted from Google Earth); (b) location of the site in Brazil, the Mato Grosso State, and distribution of the major regional biomes; (c) general overview of the Serra das Araras in the studied region; (d) view of the location of the Santa Elina rock shelter (at the base of the rock wall that appears in the center of the photograph, as indicated by the arrow). Map and photographs by Caroline Bachelet. (Color online).
From Rita Scheel-Ybert and Caroline Bachelet, 2020

A study of the ecology and plants of the site by Rita Scheel-Ybert and Caroline Bachelet, 2020 gives information about the climate conditions during the occupation periods mentioned further up: "Since it was first occupied, the Santa Elina rock shelter has been part of the cerrado biome [Cerrado is a tropical savanna located in Central Brazil, with grasslands, forests, and shrublands]. At about 27,000 cal BP (AZ-1) the site was surrounded by a forested environment. The small charcoal sample does not allow for further climatic inferences, but previous paleoecological studies corroborate the existence of a cold and humid climate in Central Brazil between about 27,000 and 20,000 BP (Salgado-Labouriau et al. 1997). This same study demonstrated a decrease in humidity from about 18,500 BP onward, with a very dry climate until about 11,500 BP (Salgado-Labouriau et al. 1997). During this interval, evidence of human occupation in Santa Elina shelter is scarce or nonexistent (Vialou et al. 2017)... Between about 11,000 and 10,000 cal BP (AZ-2) the occupation resumes; "

Charcoal remains in the cave mean that there was fire, and fire seems to imply human presence, although natural fires are not uncommon and don't require a human agent. Sheel-Ybert and Bachelet write that "Fire is an ancient and important ecological agent in the cerrado (Coutinho 1990). Natural and anthropogenic fires have coexisted in its domain for thousands of years (Miranda et al. 2009): cerrado fire events have been recorded in Central Brazil since 32,400 yrs BP (Salgado-Labouriau et al. 1997). Some authors question the human presence in this region before about 11,000 yrs BP (e.g., Schmitz 1990), thus precluding the possibility of human-induced fires before the Holocene, but the chronology of the earlier occupation in Santa Elina pushes back the antiquity of human colonization."

But, regarding the cave's charcoal, they state that "The anthracological assemblage of the earliest occupation of Santa Elina rock shelter (SU-III), dated at about 27,000 cal BP, consists of a set of 16 samples, each one presenting between one and six taxa. This result is consistent with short-term human occupations, in which case temporary combustion activities would have likely produced these charcoal samples. Yet, we cannot exclude the possibility that this evidence could also have been produced by natural fires... [However,] We therefore argue that the charcoal retrieved in this unit was produced in short-term combustion features related to episodic and sporadic human activities, one of which might have involved the butchering of giant sloths."

Conclusions

The evidence seems to suggest ancient human presence. Of course, human remains would be much better, but fire, tools and butchered giant sloths are strong evidence of an early human presence in south-central South America. It also prompts us to explore and find more similar places. There must be many undiscovered sites hiding in plain site in the jungles of South America, possibly even older than Santa Elina.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall © 

mtDNA Haplogroup M in America - 2007 paper revisited

Back in 2014 I posted about Ancient migrants into America carrying mtDNA M haplogroup 5,000 years ago. In it, I mentioned the only study published, in 2007*, on the analysis of remains from a site in British Columbia, Canada (China Lake) and reported finding mtDNA haplogroup M, and suggested, due to the age of the reamains, that it was, together with haplogroups A (A2), B (B2), C (C1b, Cc, C1d9), X (X2a), and D (D1) one of the founding maternal lineages in America.

This groundbreaking paper reported the following:

"We analyzed two mid-Holocene (∼5000 years before present) individuals from North America that belong to mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) haplogroup M, a common type found in East Asia, but one that has never before been reported in ancient or living indigenous populations in the Americas. This study provides evidence that the founding migrants of the Americas exhibited greater genetic diversity than previously recognized, prompting us to reconsider the widely accepted five-founder model that posits that the Americas were colonized by only five founding mtDNA lineages."

* Malhi, Ripian et al. (2007), Mitochondrial haplogroup M discovered in prehistoric North Americans. Journal of Archaeological Science 34, 642-648. doi:10.1016/j.jas.2006.07.004

Nineteen years of Silence

I find it surprising, that in almost 19 years after the publication of the original paper there haven't been andy new studies, research, publications, or confirmation (or refutation) of this finding... What is going on?

Citations

But Malhi's paper was noticed. I checked Google Scholar and saw that there were 85 papers that cited Mahli et al. Yet, none of them seem to deal with this new founding haplogroup.

Mahli's paper specifically thanks the support provided by the "Canoe Creek, Soda Creek, and Dog Creek Bands who allowed the DNA testing of their ancestors". A similar paper, also published in 2007, reported the presence of haplogroup A in 5,000 year-old remains from Big Bar Lake, British Columbia, In this case the haplogroup is one of the recognized founding lineages and the authors stated that "Testing for mitochondrial DNA indicated haplogroup A, which is widespread in living Native Americans. Comparative mtDNA data suggest long-standing genetic continuity in the Pacific Northwest, but with evidence for a genetically diverse population in existence at 5000 BP."

This scientific ratificaton is what Native American communities are looking for, and what they like: continuity and "original people" confirmation. The paper also notes the support from the first people: "Collaboration between anthropologists and the Canoe Creek and High Bar First Nations"

I did find a publication ( Ancient DNA In Canada Reveals New Founding Lineage of Native Americans, Mammoth Trumpet, April 2007, Vol 22 No. 2 p.18), that mentions Malhi's paper and gives advances of his findings. It says, among other things: "These remains are 5,000 years old, and mtDNA recovered from the bones belong to haplogroup M. Like the other five Native American haplogroups, M has its roots in Asia, so it is consistent with the accepted model of the peopling of the Americas that has Asian groups migrating across Beringia, or along the Pacific rim, and into North America. This discovery, however, calls into serious question other aspects of the traditional model. Dr. Malhi and his co-authors write, “Our discovery demonstrates that a more genetically diverse group of migrants colonized the Americas than previously thought and supports the hypothesis that significant undocumented genetic diversity likely still remains in the Americas.” In other words, the discovery of a previously unknown haplogroup not only demonstrates that ancient America was more genetically diverse than modern native America, it also increases the likelihood that more undiscovered haplogroups remain to be revealed by additional research." It also informs that the native tribes and the scientists agreed to rebury the remains after the studies. So, maybe that is why no further research was conducted on them.

A 2015 symposium included a paper by Alexa Walker, Brian Egan and George Nicholas (DNA & Indigeneity Proceedings, p. 5. The Changing Role of Genetics in Indigenous Rights, Tribal Belonging, and Repatriation. Oct. 22, 2015, Vancouover, BC, Canada) which gives a very brief summary of the discovery: "China Lake Ancestors In 1982, two individuals dated to over 6,000 years ago were found in a single burial site near China Lake, British Columbia. Genetic results found that both individuals belong to haplogroup M. Prior to this study, haplogroup M had not been found in any ancient or living North American populations. The results indicate that we still have much to learn about human expansion into the Americas. Further reading: Malhi et al. 2007."

Mahli also attended the symposium and his presentation can be read on page 49 (Partnerships with First Nations of British Columbia on Studies that include DNA Analysis). He again mentions the finding: "However, the China Lake individuals were found to possess a mitochondrial genome not currently found in sampled Indigenous individuals from the Americas. This lineage may either be in very low frequency or it may not exist anymore, possibly as a result of European contact and colonization."

Another paper published in Science (Victor Moreno-Mayar, 2018), in its Supplementary material (see p. 3), gives more details when it mentions the Big Bar Lake mtDNA results adding that "the two individuals recovered from the roughly contemporaneous, nearby China Lake site (the two sites are separated by just ~25 km), which could only be identified to mtDNA superhaplogroup M but excluding haplogroups C and D, a lineage common in East Asia, but otherwise unknown in the Americas. But, once again, it is citing the original, and for now, only paper on this subject, Malhi's 2007 work."

mtDNA M Haplogroup

I will summarize an interesting paper on this haplogroup by Marrero P, Abu-Amero KK, Larruga JM, Cabrera VM. Carriers of human mitochondrial DNA macrohaplogroup M colonized India from southeastern Asia. BMC Evol Biol. 2016 Nov 10;16(1):246. doi: 10.1186/s12862-016-0816-8. PMID: 27832758; PMCID: PMC5105315.

There are no "ancient and autochthonous mtDNA M lineages in western Eurasia", which is strange because the Out of Africa migration had to pass through this area in its initial dispersal, and the M haplogroup is ancient, splitting from the basal African L haplogroup at the time of the Out of Africa migration. The mtDNA M haplogroup is found in Australia, South East Asia, India, China, Arabia, Central Asia, Siberia. It is also found in some parts of North Africa and Europe (due to a back-mirgration from Asia).

The authors support a northern route for its dispersal and not a southern one that followed the coast of the Indian Ocean.

There are M1 lineages in the Mediterranean regions of Europe and the Middle East, and are believed to have arrived there from North Africa during the Paleolithic. And reached Africa from Southern Asia. The M haplogroup curently found among the Finno-Ugaric people in Lapland, the Urals, Northern Russia and Hungary is very recent, and due to a migration originating in East Asia (the Huns settled in Hungary, and we have the Mongols of Gengis Khan too!). There are also historic mixtures of Indian M variants in Mesopotamia and in the Roma (gypsy) people in Europe.

The Expansion route out of Africa: across the Middle East. the authors consider the archaich "fossils of early modern humans at Skhul and Qafzeh" as the first to successfully leave Africa, carrying the L3 haplo with them. They marched with a Northeastern course, and are associated with the early modern humans found in China ~100 ka. The authors propose an older age than generally accepted for the M haplogroup and say: "...we opine that the geneticists should resynchronize the mtDNA molecular clock with the Levant and East Asia fossil records instead of consider them as result of unsuccessful migrations."

These early migrants went north, reaching the Altai Mountains, admixed with Neanderthals and Denisovans there and then headed south due to the harsh weather there, crossing China into Southeast Asia, across Sunda, into Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, and Australia. From SE Asia they headed towards the NW, into India. Later "...in subsequent mild climatic windows, demographic growth dispersed macrohaplogroup M... northwards, most probably from overlapping areas that in time colonized northern Asia and the New World."

The maps below (fig. 2 in the paper) show the original dispersal (a) and the later one (b) including the backflow of M1 into Africa (dashed line).

Could these archaics, with Denisovan and Neanderthal admixture have continued their trek from Altai towards Beringia and then into America, 100,000 years ago? Did they carry the M haplogroup to America? Are the remains from China Lake in Canada the last of a long lineage that was stamped out by later arrivals c. 20 kya?

Considering also that the M haplo is also found in Melanesia... could it suggest an ancient +5ky old transpacific contact between Melanesia and British Columbia?

Continues in my next post.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall © 

Early European and African Presence in South America? (Chachapoyas)

Today I will follow up on the "third component" of the Cachapoyas mentioned in a recent post-

I read a paper cited in by Guevara et al. (2020) in their references, which discussed this component (Barbieri C, Barquera R, Arias L, Sandoval JR, Acosta O, Zurita C, Aguilar-Campos A, Tito-Alvarez AM, Serrano-Osuna R, Gray RD, Mafessoni F, Heggarty P, Shimizu KK, Fujita R, Stoneking M, Pugach I, Fehren-Schmitz L. The Current Genomic Landscape of Western South America: Andes, Amazonia, and Pacific Coast. Mol Biol Evol. 2019 Dec 1;36(12):2698-2713. doi: 10.1093/molbev/msz174. PMID: 31350885; PMCID: PMC6878948.)

I came across some interesting facts which I share below.

The paper also looked into post-Columbian (after 1492) introgression of European (conquest) and African (slave trade) genes into the native Amerindians. The chart below is from this paper, it gives the admixture dates based on different analytical tools.

Admixture dates between European and African sources. Estimates of admixture are calculated with the MALDER and WAVELETS methods. Dates are expressed in generations ago and converted to calendar years using a generation time of 29 years.. Source

As expected most dates are located between the late 1500s and mid 1700s, but a few fall way earlier, even before the discovery of America! around 1380 AD.

The authors explain this oddity as follows:

"Finally, studies of ancient DNA have shown that as much as one third of the ancestry in modern Native Americans could be traced to western Eurasia (Raghavan et al. 2014). Similarly, modern-day Europeans were found to be a mixture of three ancestral populations, one of which was a population deeply related to Native Americans (Lazaridis et al. 2014). These findings imply that European (or more accurately, Eurasian) ancestry found in modern-day Native Americans may not have been acquired exclusively through admixture during the post-Columbian period, but instead may reflect a much deeper origin. It is therefore possible that the WT method is picking up this signal of shared ancestry, which predates European colonization, and hence infers dates for some populations that are too early to be consistent with the first appearance of the conquistadors in the Americas, only after 1492."

I am skeptical, a signal of ancient pre-Beringian Eurasian genetic material shared by Western Europeans and Native Americans? Far fetched. Perhaps the method is wrong, the generation times are shorter, or there was some type of pre-Columbian contact with Europeans (Genoese, Venetian, Viking, or evern older like Romans, Carthaginians, Greek, Minoans, and why not, Phoenicians).

The Tumbes signal indicates Yoruba (African) input around 1380! Could these have been slaves of European mariners? But, why would these genes appear among people living along the Pacific coast of South America, and not along the Atlantic coast? Wouldn't an early contact with Europeans or Africans have brought the same catastrophic Old World diseases to America and wiped out the native population?

Further studies could answere these questions.

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

A site dated at 37,000 years ago in the Colorado Plateau!

An interesting title for a new paper: Human Occupation of the North American Colorado Plateau ∼37,000 Years Ago by Timothy Rowe et al. (Front. Ecol. Evol., 07 July 2022, Sec. Paleontology https://doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2022.903795).

The abstract gives this very ancient site an age of 38,900–36,250 cal BP and 37,000 years ago is well before the 15Ky usually accepted by the Out of Beringia theory that is mainstream orthodoxy regarding the peopling of America!:

" Calibrating human population dispersals across Earth’s surface is fundamental to assessing rates and timing of anthropogenic impacts and distinguishing ecological phenomena influenced by humans from those that were not. Here, we describe the Hartley mammoth locality, which dates to 38,900–36,250 cal BP by AMS 14C analysis of hydroxyproline from bone collagen. We accept the standard view that elaborate stone technology of the Eurasian Upper Paleolithic was introduced into the Americas by arrival of the Native American clade ∼16,000 cal BP. It follows that if older cultural sites exist in the Americas, they might only be diagnosed using nuanced taphonomic approaches. We employed computed tomography (CT and μCT) and other state-of-the-art methods that had not previously been applied to investigating ancient American sites. This revealed multiple lines of taphonomic evidence suggesting that two mammoths were butchered using expedient lithic and bone technology, along with evidence diagnostic of controlled (domestic) fire. That this may be an ancient cultural site is corroborated by independent genetic evidence of two founding populations for humans in the Americas, which has already raised the possibility of a dispersal into the Americas by people of East Asian ancestry that preceded the Native American clade by millennia. The Hartley mammoth locality thus provides a new deep point of chronologic reference for occupation of the Americas and the attainment by humans of a near-global distribution. "

Slowly but surely evidence is supporting the notion of an ancient peopling of America.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2022 by Austin Whittall © 

Early man in Northern Yukon 300,000 years ago

This paper dating back to the 1980s: Stratigraphic, Sedimentological and Faunal Evidence for the Occurrence of Pre-Sangamonian artifacts in Northern Yukon by Jopling, AV, WN Irving, and BF Beebe. 1981.Arctic 34 (1): 3-33, reports evidence of ancient human presence in Yukon - Alaska. An excerpt from the paper is very interesting:

"... It is interesting that these early human inhabitants predate the extinction in Europe and western Asia of most or all populations of Homo sapiens neandertalensis. Indeed, if Unit 1 is of Illinoian = Riss age, these artefacts probably are older than Mousterian cultures and Neandertal Man. Elsewhere, Irving (1978a, b) has commented on a plausible relationship of these early cultures to the Early Palaeolithic of the Far East, ar elationship anticipated by Chard (e.g. 1963) and more recently by Rouse (19801, although terminologies differ. Bryan (1978) has published an unusual human calotte from Brazil which beckons renewed attention in this connection. In a recent announcement Chia et al. (1979) describe a large collection of vertebrate fossils and stone artefacts found near Hsuchiayao in Yangkao County, Shansi, China. They attribute the entire collection to an age comparable with that of the Riss (Illinoian) glaciation. The associated human skeletal remains are said to be intermediate between Homo erectus and Homo neandertalensis (sic). Elsewhere Medvedev (1979) appears to have documented the northward progress ofHomo sp. as far as the Aldan Plateau in Siberia, 200 000 or more years ago. We must now, therefore, entertain seriously the possibility that a variant of Homo erectus reached the Western Hemisphere, as recently suggested by Yoshizaki (pers. comm., 1981). If true, this must profoundly affect both studies of the origin of Homo sapiens and studies of New World populations..."

For map lovers, This map shows the site.

1981 was ages ago!!! I was in my 20s!!, the world was quite different, wasn't it? No internet, cellphones, WiFi, I was programming in Fortran in University! The so called good old days... like another life ago!

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2017 by Austin Whittall © 

An old paper with Amerindians as ancestral to Europeans and Asians

Just a very short post. I came across an old paper (A view of modern human origins from Y chromosome microsatellite variation, Ibrahim, Muntaser E.; Seielstad, Mark), which gave an "old" origin date for African Y chromosomes, which by the way were the "most diverse". The funny part are Fig. 1 and 2. Shown below:

Trees showing the relationship of Y chromosome among humans. Americans seem to be the oldest after Africa.. From Ibrahim and Seielstad.

These figures have Asians and Europeans further from the root than Amerindians...

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2014 by Austin Whittall ©