Arroyo Vizcaino, Uruguay: a 33 ky spear lesion in an extinct ground sloth

This is another post in my series on pre-Clovis sites in America. A bone of an extinct ground sloth, a Lestodon, found in Uruguay, close to its capital city of Montevideo was reported last year by Fariña et al. The research paper cautiously suggests that the hole in the bone of this sloth was caused by humans, 33,000 years ago.

Read the original paper: Fariña RA, Hayes E, Lemoine LA, Fullagar R, Tambusso PS, Varela L (2025) An indentation in a 33,000-year-old right calcaneus of the ground sloth Lestodon (Xenarthra, Folivora) from Uruguay and its possible human agency. Swiss Journal of Palaeontology 144: 31. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13358-025-00379-0

The hole caused by... a spear? 33,000 years ago. From Fariña et al., 2025

The hole in the right calcaneus (a bone in the paw) of a ground sloth (Lestodon armatus), was found in Uruguay, in a site by a creek (Arroyo Vizcaíno), that has been dated by radiocarbon to 33,000 cal years ago. The authors, who made a cast of the hole and sampled it "argue that it could have been created by a penetrating object with a rounded tip, possibly a bone, ivory or hardened wood tip attached to a shaft. This evidence contributes to discussions on the dates of human arrival in South America and the potential interactions with the megafauna."

The paper points out that the lesion hadn't healed, it was not caused by cancer (neoplasia). It discards an attack by a predator as there are no other lesions in the bones (why would only one tooth of the preadotr impact the prey?). The article finds damage associated with fracture caused by penetration.

"The analysis of the mark and rounded surfaces within the indentation suggests that the perforating object had a rounded cross-section without a sharpened tip. We propose it was more likely to be made of bone, ivory or (less likely) hardened wood, inserted into a shaft or sleeve that was long enough to allow sufficient energy to penetrate the thick bone and allow rotational and lateral movement to generate the double cavity visible in the CT scan. In addition, the attack angle and location suggests a very close range attack of about 1 or 2 m away, which requires a club like and a hafted point heavy enough to produce the force required to break the relatively thick flat face of the calcaneus at this short distance."

Interestingly, the authors note a link with Siberian hunting technology: "Osseous projectile technologies are representative of the Early Upper Palaeolithic to Late Upper Palaeolithic industries in central and eastern Siberia and are key to understanding initial human dispersal in the Americas." In a recent post, I mentioned this when I wrote about the Yana Rive Site in Siberia and their bone foreshafts!

This is just another pre-Clovis site, but 33,000 years old, in Southern South America. Which prompts me to ask: how many more are out there, waiting to be discovered? and also why are so few discovered? Lack of research funds in South America seems to be the main reason, because when the local researchers look for pre-Clovis evidence, they find it!

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

Ameghino and the Tertiary Man. Part 2.

Continuing with Florentino Ameghino (see previous post) and his theory of a Tertiary man in America, one that originated in the Americas and spread from there to the rests of the world, in today's post we will take a look at the stone tools that have a distinct "ancient" lithic technology look.

Ameghino does not hesitate to label the tools he discovers as "Mousterian" or "Acheulean", he is convinced that they are really old tools, tools not made by modern humans.

Bifacial spear point. Mousterian

He found what he calls "spear points" and states that "All the ones that we have, belong to the Moustier type, and until now we have only found one specimen crafted on both sides, which regrettably we lost the same day that we found it. It was of a great size and almond shaped, chiselled with great care on all its surface. [1]

He notes that the arrow heads (smaller than the spear points) are much neater than the Moustier points and says, regarding spears, the following:

"The face is fashioned with large blows and only are the edges fashioned with some care.
The most common shape is shown in figures 54 and 56, leaf shaped and knapped with strong blows...[1]

Mousterian spear point from arroyo Frías, Buenos Aires. Fig. 54, From [1]

Axe, Acehulean

Ameghino also mentions axes. He recognizes that they are "extremely rare, and cites one, resembling an Acheulean axe, found by a Jesuit missionary in the hills at Tandil, 350 km southwest of Buenos Aires:

"of common cuartz, thick bodied, pointed, ovoidal and approaching the Saint-Acehul, 125 milimeters long, a maximum width of 70 and 20 thick.
Personally we have found several quartz stones [...] the largest is shown in figure 117, found on the shores of cañada Rocha. It is the exact reproduction of a variety of Quaternary European axe, known as Moustier. It is made of quartz, elongated oval shape and knapped on one face. The worked face is convex and chiselled with care on all its surface, but especially its edges, which are chipped with small blows. It is well sharpened, especially on both of its tips [...] it is 65 milimeters long, 29 wide and 11 thick in its thickest part, the central one." [1]

Mousterian tool, from cañada Rocha, Buenos Aires. Fig. 117, From [1]

Axe, unifacial and bifacial, Mousterian

Besides the few "axes" from Buenos Aires mentioned above, he mentions others discovered in Uruguay, some of which are "worked on one side". These are not biface axes, they are "unifacial" (perhaps used as scrapers).

"Apart from these axes worked on only one face, there are others, shorter and not so thick, with a wider, rounded base, which also end in a pretty pointed tip, very similar in their outline to the triangular axe found in the Moustier cave, drawn by Hamy in his «Paléontologie Humaine» [...]
The best specimen we found is shown in figure 300, it is 152 milimeters long, 134 in its widest part and 58 in its thickest. A large part of its edge is shaped with concoidal blows, in particular its upper tip, which has been knapped and thinned so that it can be easily gripped.
Axes worked on both faces are not so numerous as the others. The most notable one we have, is oval shaped, convex on both facces and shaped with heavy blows on all of its surface [...] This instrument is depicted in fig. 289, it is shaped in such a way that it has a cutting edge all along its border, produced by many concoidal blows, applied in an oblique manner on one side and the other side of the edge. The surface of the stone has several concoideal depressions with a very flat bottom, the outcome of having removed, with blows, great pieces of stone. It is 19 centimeters long, 12 wide and 8 thick in its thickest part, and it ways 57 ounces... [1]

Mousterian axe, Uruguay. Fig. 300, From [1]

Mousterian axe, Uruguay. Fig. 289, From [1]

Leaving Ameghino for the time being, below is another image, this one corresponding to a hand axe found in Montevideo, Uruguay, at the small hill that overlooks the town, (Cerro de Montevideo), at Punta del Tigre. It is part of the Museo Nacional de Antropología museum. It is a rather coarse looking axe. [2]

Hand Axe from Montevideo, Uruguay. From [2]

He believed these tools were the work of humans that had originated in America. He devised a hypothetical evolutionary chain, from the most primitive hominin to the most advanced ones. A chain built on feeble links, since the remains of some of these creatures were never found. In a previous post I mentioned the "Diprothomo" skull found during the building of Buenos Aires port, Ameghino believed that it belonged to one of his hypothetical hominids (Diprothomo). But this will be the subject of another post.

To be continued.

Sources

[1] Ameghino, F., and C., (1918). La antigüedad del hombre en el Plata ... Texto de la edición oficial, dirigida por A.J. Torcelli bajo la dirección de Carlos Ameghino pp. 132 and 222
[2] Citrino.Blogspot

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

Seals that live in freshwater

Florian Paucke (1719 - 1780) was a Jesuit missionary, born in Bohemia. He spent almost twenty years among the Mocoví natives in the missions of Paraguay between 1749 and 1767, when the Spanish crown siezed the properties of the Jesuit Order and deported its members back to Europe.

Paucke depicted the daily scenes of his mission, the natives and the animals of the surrounding regin in a series of naive watercolors. One of his paintings is reproduced below. It shows a group of natives hunting capivara or carpincho with spears. Around the border of the painting it also shows some aquatic riverine mammals:

Animals painted by R. Paucke late XVIII century. Paraguay.

During his stay in Southern South America, he encountered different creatures: Carpinchos, jaguars and, as shown in the image above, a very strange seal (red arrow).

Besides painting them, he wrote a book, "From here to there: a stay among the Mocoví Indians (1749-1767)" from which we took the following quote, describing an island on the Paraná River:

"On this tiny island there were many tigers [jaguars] , deer, wild pigs, ostriches [ñandu - Rhea], venison, leopards, [ocelote or Leopardus pardalis mitis] sea wolves and sea pigs (carpinchos) in large quantities....". [1]

He depicted one of the sea wolves, upper central part of the image above. Marked with a red arrow.

The caption above the creature reads: "Sea Wolf, Lobo Marino, enelaviagei ?". In German or English, Spanish and Mocoví ? respectively.

The words Sea and Marino, which is the Spanish word for "belonging to the sea" clearly identify this creature as a sea faring animal. Which is surprising since Paraguay is several hundred kilometers from the sea. The description of a Carpincho as a "Sea Pig" is also surprising since this is definitively a fresh water animal.

Taking a closer look at the "sea wolf", it appears to be very otter-like, with a long slim bushy tail, claws (no webbing between its toes), short ears and short snout. Yet it does not stand up on its legs, it lies on its belly, in a seal-like manner. Quite intriguing indeed!

The Paraná River was home to all the animals that he mentioned in his text, except for the "sea wolves". There were what the Spaniards called Lobitos de río, that is "Tiny River Wolves", which are otters. But he clearly states that they were sea going animals, perhaps implying that they were not otters, but seals.

The larger River wolves were the White-chested Otter (Lutra brasiliensis), the biggest otter in the world, currently found in the Amazon River basin, whose range in the past included the River Plate basin. [3]

But Sea wolf is the Spanish name for a type of seal, not an otter.

Paucke must have surely seen seals and sea wolves when he reached South America, on the islands at the entrance to the River Plate, in an estuarine salt - fresh water area. Even today they can be found on the rocks close to Cabo Polonio, Santa María and Punta del Este, in Uruguay. They may have been more abundant in the 1700s.

But what about the region further upstream, along the Parana and Uruguay Rivers, that flow into the River Plate?

Seals in the River Plate basin

I found a reference that states that phocidae and otariidae (seals) swam upstream along the Parana and Uruguay Rivers [2].

Another reference comes from Spanish naturalist Félix de Azara (1801) who mentions a river over 700 km (435 mi) from the sea, which flows into the Paraná River, as having "sea wolves":

"The Corrientes river is large and bigger than the Guayquiraró: it has sands and breeds many sea wolves, stingrays that sting with cruelty, yacarés [a South American croc] and many other fish." [4]

Sea Wolves are even mentioned in landlocked Salta province, over 1,300 km (800 mi) from Buenos Aires and the sea. Naturalist Holmberg cites Stuar who, in 1878, saw "Sea and river wolves" [5] in Salta. This should not be surprising since the Pilcomayo, Bermejo, Juramento rivers, which flow into the Paraguay and Paraná rivers, reach the Andean foothills in Salta. All of these rivers are part of the River Plate Basin. Seals could, in theory, swim upstream along any of them.

Sources

[1] Florian Paucke. Hacia allá y para acá: (una estada entre los indios Mocobíes, 1749-1767). Vol. 2. pp. 41. Editorial Nuevo Siglo, 2000.
[2] Anales de la Sociedad Científica Argentina, Volumes 127-128. 1939 pp. 295
[3]O. V. Aplin, (1894) Field-Notes on the Mammals of Uruguay. Zoological Society of London
[4] Félix de Azara, (1801). Memorias sobre el estado rural del Rio de la Plata en 1801: Demarcacion ..... Sanchiz, 1847. pp. 34
[5] Claudio Bertonatti, (1994). Los que se van: especies argentinas en peligro. Editorial Albatros, pp. 244.

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

More on the Caaiguá wild men

My recent post on the Caaiguá people, wild men, left me a bit intrigued, so I did some more research and came across the original texts written by contemporary witnesses: Jesuit priests from the Missions in the jungles close to where these people lived.

The Jesuits's written accounts show that these people were quite singular:

• They spoke a language that was quite different from the Guaraní language spoken by the surrounding tribes.
• It had a "whistling" like sound
• The Caaiguá lived in caves and were stone-age hunter gatherers
• They were described as similar to both apes and men and with limited intellectual capabilities
• They were also very belicose and violent

I am inclined to believe that they were indeed a relict Neanderthal group, human yet not human enough, feature that led both natives and missionaries to consider them authentic wild men.

Wild Men in detail

Father Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro, wrote several learned books on the native languages of North and South America, and, as could be expected, mentioned the language spoken by the Caaiguas. I quote him below (the bold font is mine):

"The Caaiguá Language.
The Caaiguá language is spoken by the nation of the same name that has settled to the east of the Uruguay River to the north, near its sources [Shaded in red in map below] it is a peculiar language of rough and difficult pronounciation as Techo correctly notes, and speaks about the Caaiguá tongue as follows: 'The Caaiguás use their own language which is hard to understand because when they pronounce the words they do not seem to speak but instead whistle or form unintelligible tones in their throats'.
The name Caaiguás is Guaraní and means wild and because the converted and civilized Guaraní usually give the name of caaiguá to some Guaraní tribes that wander about in the jungle, some authors have believed that the Caaiguá is a Guaraní dialect and have mistaken the true Caaiguás for the nomad Guaraní tribes..." [1]

This is very interesting, it clearly points out that these people are not Guaraní. That the also name applies to ethnic Guaraní people who live under their pre-hispanic conditions, in the jungle. But that the real Caaiguá people are a distinct group with their own peculiar language.

And a very strange language indeed, with whistling sounds!. I looked up the text written by father Techo, which Hervás y Panduro quoted, and it proved to be very interesting too:

Nicolás del Techo's text

He was born in Lille in 1611 as "du Toict" (which he modified to a Spanish version: "del Techo"), and died at the Mission in Apóstoles in 1687. He became a Jesuit in 1619 and came to America in 1640 working as a missionary, and historian in South America.

This text was published in Antwerp in 1654 as the "Relatio triplex de rebus indicis". It was a letter that he wrote in 1651 at the Mission of Santa María La Mayor, on the Uruguay River in the Missions of Paraguay.

Map showing the probable territory of the Caaiguás and the Jesuit Missions
Copyright © 2014 by Austin Whittall

The mission is located in Argentina, in the province of Misiones, Santa María municipality. It was founded in 1626 and abandoned in 1767. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and has been restored.

Below I quote the intersting parts of the text (bold font is mine):

"We are taking care of here, the two of us, of two thousand six hundred indians [...] To this task we add another, not less difficult: the taming of the most ferocious Caaiguá people. [...]
The Caaiguá people are not very numerous and are the less apt for work among all the indians. They live in the jungles between the Paraná and Iguazú rivers [Shaded in Yellow in the map below] , and for this reason the surrounding tribes call them jungle inhabitants (which is the meaning of the name Caaiguá). They speak their own language, not very easy to learn, because, they when they issue their sounds, it seems that, instead of speaking, they whistled, producing a whirlwind of inaticulate explosions in their throats.
They have very few huts and these are very far apart. Most of these indians are happy living in hovels, like animals, and do not procure their food any better than them, so they do not practice agriculture or have any farming activities. The fish and hunt with bow and arrow. Nevertheless, most of the year they eat raw worms, mice, ants and other small creaturs that they can catch easily. The fight with tapirs [...] they kil them and eat them; climbing up trees they catch monkeys with such dextrity, as if they themselves were apes. They like monkey meat a lot and eat jaguar meat without flinching [...] They are physically deformed and are monstrous, similar to both monkeys and men, especially if you look at their noses, which allows you to fairly call them stub-nosed. As they live in the jungles most of them have their backs bent and hunched, making their gaze remain fixed towards the ground. They walk in a bent over manner. However many of them have a nicer appearance, especially the women, who born and bred in the shade keep the color of their body quite similar to that of Europeans." [2]

He also mentions that they were wild and fierce, muderding anyone who dared to go into their territory, that the Guaraní killed them whenever they could. And that when captured they were "difficult to tame [...] refused food and died in a few days". A missionary, Father Claudio brought up a Caaiguá boy and taught him the Guaraní language so that he could be an interpreter for him (a clear indication that Guaraní and Caaiguá spoke distinct languages) and went to their territory to convert them, enticing some to come down to the mission:

"So some of them came out of their caves and [...] canme to the town of Santa María La Mayor.[2]

They did this again and: "After a journey of nine days this illustious hunter of souls went into the caves of the wild men and through his interpreter managed to get eighteen of them to agree to be converted and follow him [...] he found the inept to retain and obtuse to undestand clearly." [2]

The Jesuits fought against a slaver raid by the Brazilian Mamelucos and freed several Caaiguá natives, earning their gratitude.

The Brazilians hunted natives to capture them and sell them as slaves. This decimated the native tribes of what is now Southern Brazil, Paraguay and the Argentine provinces of Misiones and Corrientes. The Jesuits organized armies to fight them off, but when the Spanish cronw expelled the Jesuit Order from America, their missions quickly dissolved and became ghost-towns, swallowed up by the jungle. The natives disbanded and returned to their old customs.

The region remained forgotten during the independence and civil wars of the early XIX century. It returned to the limelight during the war between Paraguay and Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina in the 1860s and its borders were drawn up during the late 1800s. At that time Argentine explorers such as Ambrosetti and Lista visited the region (which was part of a border dispute between Brazil and Argentina). Both of them mistook the ethnic "wild" Guaraní people for the original Caaiguá people.

Juan Ambrosetti (1886) called them Kaingangues, Caigua, Caingua and Ramón Lista (1883) Caayguás, but these were not the real Caaiguá mentioned by del Techo, who had probably already become extinct due to the slaving raids of the late 1700s.

Sources

[1] Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro, (1800). Catálogo De Las Lenguas De Las Naciones Conocidas, Y Numeracion, Division, Y Clases De Estas Segun La Diversidad De Sus Idiomas Y Dialectos: Lenguas Y Naciones Americanas. Rank, Vol 1. pp 296.
[2] Nicolás del Techo, (1654) Relación Sobre la Gente Caaigua que se empezó a convertir. Republished by Arturo Nagy & Francisco Pérez Maricevich, (1967), Tres Encuentros Con América. Ed. del Centenario, Asunción.

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

30 kya old stone tools from a site in Uruguay

Uruguay is a small country in southern South America, between Brazil and Argentina, relatively flat -an eastern extension of the Argentine Pampas, it has some hills not more than 500 m (1,500 ft.), with ancient Paleozoic rocks. It is also the place where ancient stone tools dated to 32,000 years ago have been found, at the Arroyo del Vizcaíno (the name means: Vizcaine creek - Vizcaine is a native of Vizcaya, Spain).

The stone tools

A paper published last November(Fariña et al, 2013) describes some megafaunal bones that they dug up at a site by this creek which displayed some marks similar to those produced by a human cutting tool. They also came across some lithic material which they described as follows:

Although during the fieldwork no systematic effort was made to collect lithic material and only a part of this site has been exhaustively explored, a few lithic elements were found to have seemingly anthropogenic features, although such elements are scarce, as is usual in South American Pleistocene archaeological sites.
These include flakes made of silicified sandstone (see the electronic supplementary material), but their grain size prevented further microscopical analysis. However, a small piece of translucid silcrete has features compatible with a scraper (figure 4f,g) [shown below].
This piece was found in bed 2 in very close association with several bones (figure 2b). It is a pseudo-pyramidal nucleus with dimensions 29.6 × 14.5 × 15.5 mm. Both proximal and distal borders are short and convex. They are unifacially retouched and asymmetrically bevelled at intermediate angles (70° in the proximal border and 60° in the distal one). The proximal border presents marginal semicircular retouching, and the distal border shows deep retouching of irregularly parallel morphology. Using a scanning electron microscope (SEM) at 700–4300×, an area was identified (asterisk in figure 4f) extending along a large portion of the distal edge of the largest face that reflects the incidental electrons differently from the central parts of that face. That area is rather dull and coarse, with circular microdepressions that are darker than the rest of the surface (see the electronic supplementary material, figure S15), covering the high zones as well as the low ones, and is accompanied by noteworthy edge rounding.
These features are consistent with those observed in a second-stage micropolish, as produced by working on dry hide. Micropolish is the only feature observable with optical microscopy that is produced by the use of a tool and not by natural or accidental causes, and thus it is a diagnostic indicator of human agency even in the absence of any other kind of evidence. Both retouched edges show a nearly continuous pattern of microflaking of different size and morphology.

Arroyo del Vizcaino lithic material.

Once again (see my previous post), the stone tool looks rather primitive and roughly hewn, if man-made, the work of a clumsy or maybe primitive hominin (perhaps an extant H. erectus or Neanderthal).

The authors therefore document a "Human–megafauna interaction" involving 1,000 bones belonging to 27 animals.

Since there is "little evidence of major fluvial transport" and most animals were "prime adults" they concluded that they had been killed by humans. Furthermore additional evidence pointed that way: ".. several bones present deep, asymmetrical, microstriated, sharp and shouldered marks similar to those produced by human stone tools....".

The problem is that "...the radiocarbon age of the site is unexpectedly old (between 27 and 30 thousand years ago)...". Problem in the sense that it goes against the Clovis first theory and pushes the peopling of America date back by about 10,000 years at least.

No wonder Fariña and team are cautious in wording their finding, not to ruffle the feathers in the caps of orthodox scientists who will surely pounce on them and ridicule the finding by questioning it(methods, dating, etc.).

Quoting the paper (bold mine):

... However, besides some rather controversial claims in both South and North America, current evidence for humans arriving in the New World (excluding Beringia) before the Last Glacial Maximum (as indicated by the dates at Arroyo del Vizcaíno) is equivocal. Thus, the age of the site and the scarcity of formal tools urge caution in interpretation. In any case, we argue that the Arroyo del Vizcaíno site deserves to be included in the agenda of early American peopling, either as a not foreseeable discovery or as an example of natural processes mimicking human presence...

In other words, they are saying that: this site seems old but it goes against orthodoxy, please consider it, either to prove it is a natural process and not man-made or, maybe, just perhaps, add it to the list of "ancient" sites that bear a large question mark.

What is needed is in anthropology is a Galileo and a Copernicus to break through the Ptolemaic nonsense concocted by Hrdlicka nearly a century ago, when he invented the Clovis first theory.

Sources

Richard A. Fariña1, P. Sebastián Tambusso, Luciano Varela1, Ada Czerwonogora, Mariana Di Giacomo1, Marcos Musso, Roberto Bracco and Andrés Gascue, (2013), Arroyo del Vizcaíno, Uruguay: a fossil-rich 30-ka-old megafaunal locality with cut-marked bones, Published 20 November 2013 doi: 10.1098/rspb.2013.2211, Proc. R. Soc. B 7 January 2014 vol. 281 no. 1774 20132211

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

Ancient Greeks in the River Plate!

 

Map showing the location of Dolores, Uruguay, site of the "Greek" remains.
Copyright © 20011 by Austin Whittall

This post is about a farmer who, in the early 1800s, lived close to the Uruguayan town of Dolores. He made an amazing finding: an inscribed stone and some ancient body armor, which was supposedly identified as belonging to a Greek explorer from the days of Alexander the Great. This story, sounds like a hoax, but since I have been posting on Phoenicians in America, I thought, ok why not! So here it is:

The original text is worth quoting from its source (a local magazine published in Soriano, the Uruguayan District where Dolores is located), a 1963 article:

A farmer [...] had discovered an ancient stone, sunk in the ground, on which some unknown letters were written. Picking up the stone, he came across a small stone chamber , inside of which were two very ancient swords, a helmet and a shield, very rusty, and a regular sized amphora. He took those pieces to Montevideo, and the priest Martínez managed to decipher the coarse and worn greek characters, whose translation was: "During the reign of Alexander king of Macedonia, son of Phillip, on the 63 olympics, here Ptolemy...", the rest of the phrase could not be read. On the hilt of one of the swords, whose blades were completely destroyed, a relief with the head of Alexander could be made out. The helmet still displayed a delicate work of metal craftmanship, representing in relief Aquiles dragging Hector's body around Troy. [1]

The sources

Text about Ptolemy, the "Greek" from 320 BC whose remains were found in Uruguay. From [1].

The above text was originally published in 1835 in the Montevideo newspaper "El Universal", who in turn took it from the December 9, 1934 issue of the "Jornal do Comercio" of Rio de Janeiro. The Brazilian journal informed that it had got the news from the "Gaceta de Francia" of Paris, which had taken it from the "Le Temps" of April 11, 1832, and this paper from the "Messager des Chambres " of March 22, 1832.

The article seems to have been published before that date in the "Giornale del Regno delle Due Sicilie" on June 11, 1829 and before that, in the "Gaceta Universal" of Bogotá Colombia.

Criticism and comments

The first flaw found in the story was the date. The 63^rd Olympic games took place around 528 - 524 BC, long before Alexander's regin (Alexander died in 323 BC).

However, if instead of 63, you read 113, the Olympic games date would fit neatly within Alexander's reign over Macedonia and most of the "known" world.

The thing is that at the time (1829) Uruguay was just coming out of a war against Brazil, in which it won its independence (with the help of Argentina), and political turmoil would have covered up the news, which was disclosed through a distant paper in Colombia instead of locally, in Montevideo.

What would a Greek ship be doing at Dolores? In those days, the delta of the Paraná River was several tens of kilometers up stream from its current position just 20 km (12.5 mi.) north of Buenos Aires.

The delta advances at about 25 to 100 m/year (82 to 328 ft/year),[2] so over the last 2,320 years it would have been located between 58 and 232 km further north (36 to 144 mi.), upstream. See the map below.

The Uruguay River lacks a delta and drains into the eastern side of the River Plate as a wide river.

Dolores, the site of the finding, is located on the San Salvador River which drains into the Uruguay River. Perhaps it offered a good port for the Greek sailors. Actually, Sebastian Cabot, the first to explore the region after Magellan and Solis, actually built a fort on the mouth of the San Salvador. He must have chosen it for some strategic reason. This fort is the first Spanish settlement in Uruguay (1527). He would later sail up the Paraná and establish Sancti Spiritus at Carcaraña, Argentina.

Could the Greek soldier be a dead member of Cabot's expedition?

Map showing coastline in 320 BC with the possible maximum and minimum area covered by water. This area in now occupied by the Delta of the Paraná River.
Copyright © 20011 by Austin Whittall

The map above shows the maximum and minimum extent of the River Plate in the days of Alexander the Great. The delta did not extend beyond Rosario or Zarate based on the max. and min. advance of the delta (58 and 232 km) mentioned above.

Sources.

[1] Un Enigma histórico. Ptolomeo fue enterrado en Dolores. Revista Histórica de soriano. May 31, 1963. No. 8. pp. 8.
[2] Marcos Pittau, Alejo Sarubbi, Angel N. Menéndez Analisis del avance del frente del delta del rio Parana

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia

2011 International Year of Forests Copyright 2009-2011 by Austin Whittall ©