The First South Americans

The prehistoric archaeology of South America is fascinating and constantly developing. Tristan Hughes is joined by Dr. Tom Dillehay to discuss how early humans navigated their migration from North to South America, adapting to diverse environments and leaving a rich archaeological record that challenges long-standing theories, including human footprints dating back 10,000 years. Presented by Tristan Hughes. The producer and audio editor is Joseph Knight, the senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music from Epidemic Sounds. The Ancients is a History Hit podcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tristan Hughes?

  Ever wondered why the Romans were defeated in the Teutoburg Forest? What secrets lie buried in prehistoric Ireland? Or what made Alexander truly great? With a subscription to History Hit, you can explore our ancient past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week, covering everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  Hey, it's Lunchbox from the Bobby Bones Show. Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability, and it starts with a great deal on an all-wheel-drive Camry, Corolla Cross, or a Corolla Sedan with the latest features in tech. Or test drive a spacious Grand Highlander or an adventure-ready RAV4. And with so many hybrid models available, you can enjoy longer trips without all the stops, while Toyota's legendary resale value means you could get more at trade-in. Get a deal today and great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com for deals and details. Toyota, let's go places.

• 1:10Speaker 02

  Verizon knows that holiday math can be complicated.

• 1:12Speaker 03

  Okay, let's see, we got the four kids, four gifts each, six teacher gifts? Wait, oh, what did we get Aunt Sandy? And the dogs, oh, can't forget the dogs.

• 1:23Speaker 02

  Know what doesn't need math? Simplicity Plan from Verizon. One plan, one price. Just $30 a line per month for you or the whole family. The holidays are complicated. Shopping our best deals and switching to Verizon is simple. For new customers, $30 per line includes auto pay and switch discount. Additional taxes, fees, and terms apply.

• 1:42Tristan Hughes?

  This episode is sponsored by Smart Travel, a new podcast from NerdWallet. Now, you know that one friend who always finds the best travel deals, picks the right cards, and somehow ends up in first class for the price of coach? Smart Travel is like that friend, but in podcast form. They cover all things travel finance, so you can stop stressing and actually start enjoying your trips. I'm lucky enough to travel a fair bit. You might have heard me talking about being on tour with The Ancients in Australia and New Zealand quite recently.

• 2:16Tristan Hughes?

  Well, Smart Travel Podcast from NerdWallet was a great help. They dig into which airport lounges are really worth it and which are just an airport gate with better snacks and worse lighting, and what actually happens when an airline loses your luggage for 12 days, and how to get real money back instead of a free drink and an apology. Plus, the tip I really needed: how to book flights without it turning into a part-time job. Travel smarter and spend less with help from NerdWallet. Follow Smart Travel wherever you get your podcasts.

• 3:02Tristan Hughes?

  It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and today while we're heading to prehistoric South America. A few months back, I received an email from an avid Ancients listener called Franco. Now Franco, he suggested that we start looking into the archaeology of South America, which is often overlooked compared to other areas of the world. And we thought that that was a brilliant idea. And so today, we're bringing some of this fascinating archaeology into the spotlight. And we're going back more than 10,000 years. Now, you might remember that we recently released an episode all about Ice Age North America and the story of the first people to reach this continent more than 10,000 years ago. That episode with Dr.

• 3:45Tristan Hughes?

  David Meltzer proved incredibly popular, and do check it out if you haven't listened to it already after this one. But it also felt like it was only half of the story. We've done the first people in North America, but what has the archaeology revealed about the first people in South America? How long did it take for humans to go from north to south? Well, joining me to talk through what we know is a man who has been at the forefront of this research for the past 40 years, Dr. Tom Dillehay from Vanderbilt University. Tom has worked and written papers about several key archaeological sites along the Pacific coast of South America, in particular, the extraordinary site of Monteverde in Chile. The incredible array of discoveries made there have completely revised what people

• 4:30Tristan Hughes?

  thought about when the first humans settled in South America, who they were, and how they lived. Tom explains all and much more as we delve into the story of the first South Americans.

• 4:45Tristan Hughes?

  Tom, it is wonderful to have you on the podcast today.

• 4:48Speaker 04

  Well, thank you. I appreciate being here.

• 4:51Tristan Hughes?

  Now, the populating of South America, the first human settlement in South America. Tom, this feels like a massive topic. I hope you're ready. Now, is this quite an exciting time for the field with with new developments and discoveries? Because we've recently done an interview with David Meltzer about the first humans in North America. And he was saying how it's very exciting at the moment with new scientific research and methods. Is it a similar case with the first South Americans too?

• 5:20Speaker 04

  Absolutely. You know, the two continents are connected because in South America, specialists see the peopling of the continent coming from North America, obviously, down through Central America, across Panama into the continent. What's really exciting is not only new discoveries going on up and down the Western Hemisphere, and particularly in recent years in South America, and also in the Amazon and along the coastline as well. But also genetics, as my colleague David Meltzer probably talked about, has added a very new and exciting dimension to the discipline

• 5:57Speaker 04

  related to connections between different kinds of sites and geographic vectors of movement and so forth. But also what's been found in recent years in South America is exciting because we have a number of South Americanists themselves from different countries who have been getting their degrees in the US and South American universities, North America, going back and doing a lot more research on this topic. So everything's coming together and coalescing in a new, exciting movement.

• 6:32Tristan Hughes?

  A new, exciting movement. So it feels like the perfect time to have got you on the podcast. And I must admit, recently, we also did an interview, an episode on the ancient Amazon. And it's been a pleasure exploring the Americas thousands of years ago and the archaeology that is coming to light. For the first humans, the populating of South America, Tom, do we have a Rich archaeological record for, let's say, more than 10,000 years ago in South America.

• 6:59Speaker 04

  It's not as rich as North America. The reason being is because there are fewer investigators over the past, let's say, 50 or 60 years, working the continent. But the record has increased significantly and mainly along the Pacific coast and the desert areas of northern Chile and Peru, but also in the high Andes as well. But there's always been a great deal of work for some curious reasons of people looking at the peopling of South America from the viewpoint of southern Patagonia and Teatro del Fuego. But also in recent years, largely due to Brazilian and French archaeologists, a lot more work's been going on in Brazil.

• 7:38Tristan Hughes?

  And so, right at the moment then, is there quite, for the sites so far discovered, just because the nature of archaeological work so far, Tom, are the majority of the sites then located on that Pacific coast? Let's say, west of that Andean ridgeline almost?

• 7:54Speaker 04

  Absolutely. Here we have to talk about what we call archaeological visibility. When you get into the Amazon jungle, you've got a dense forest and preservation of the record is difficult. Organics are not well preserved, soils have acid that eat the organic material. You've got the dense forest. But when you're working in the open deserts, west of the Andean mountains, as you mentioned, archaeological visibility is a lot easier. You can see things. On the other hand, the sites are often eroded by water and wind, too. So there's some issues there, but a lot of people in archaeology prefer to work along that Pacific coastline. But these gaps across the continent are beginning to be picked up by

• 8:37Speaker 04

  South Americans working in their own countries.

• 8:40Tristan Hughes?

  Forgive my ignorance, Tom, but if someone mentions desert, I might immediately, having grown up in Europe, I might think of, let's say, the Sahara Desert or the Gobi Desert in the Middle East. When talking about deserts in South America, I mean, geographically, do they look quite different to the ones we might imagine in Europe?

• 8:57Speaker 04

  No, they're probably. Similar in some ways. First of all, the world's driest deserts, the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. And that desert extends all the way up to what we call the altiplano, the high lands in Bolivia that reach up to 14,000 feet in elevation. That is still desert. But you have the desert also along the entire coast of Peru until you get into the forested and grasslands of the Andes. But also, you have kind of a semi-desert once you get into the Patagonian area. It's kind of like a dry step grassland where the visibility archeologically is easier than it would be in the Amazon Basin.

• 9:39Tristan Hughes?

  If we're going, let's say, more than 10,000 years ago, so I'm guessing if, let's say, people are going down that side of the Andes at that time, how different topographically do we think the whole landscape would have looked then? Do we think back then it would have been inhospitable desert too?

• 9:55Speaker 04

  I would say the deserts I was just talking about probably would have been grasslands. And since then, things have become drier and less moist. One thing that distinguishes North and South America is that you have these massive glacial ice sheets in the north that kind of prevented movement from, let's say, Yukon, Alaska, down into the lower of US 48. But the only place that you had any glaciers that might have prohibited human movement in South America was in the high Andes, central Andes, and down toward Patagonia. So movement was a lot easier across north, south, east, west, diagonally and so forth.

• 10:36Speaker 04

  But getting back to your question, the Amazon, probably 12, 14, 15,000 years ago, is not the dense, green shag carpet we think of today. It was savannas, parklands, open forest here and there. And since the late Pleistocene period, it began to fill in with this dense, high-canopy forest we think of today. And then the desert would have been, as I said, grasslands. So no, ecologically, it would have been very different in a lot of different places.

• 11:06Tristan Hughes?

  Well, let's focus on a couple of Sites that seem key, and I know the sites that you've worked on a lot, Tom, done a lot of work on these sites for this whole topic of the peopling of South America. And the first one, I mean, first of all, it struck me with its location because it feels quite far south. I would immediately think that a lot of these sites would be, let's say, near Mexico or Mesoamerica, but we've got one much further south, Monteverde. Now, what is Monteverde?

• 11:31Speaker 04

  Well, Monteverde is located in northern Patagonia, in the, what would be the cool temperate rainforest of southern Chile, what they call the Lake District, and the ecological zone that's kind of equivalent perhaps to northern Europe in some ways, bogs and swampy terrain. But Monteverde came to me, I was teaching at the time at the Southern University of Chile in Valdivia, about 400 kilometres farther north. And one day, a student came to the university with a very large quote unquote cow's tooth. It was brought to my attention, and that cow's tooth

• 12:10Speaker 04

  turned out to be a mastodon bumped with their tooth. And at the time, I didn't have too much interest in it. I said, look, if I ever get down that way, further south, I'll take a look at it. And I did. About a year later, I got down there and we found some large ribs and other teeth eroding out of an embankment of a small creek called Chinchiwapi Creek, that the local forest people use for bringing out cut timber in the local forest on ox carts, basically. So I began in 1977 excavating at the site, 77 through about 87, in the last century. And fortunately,

• 12:53Speaker 04

  the site was overlaid by a peat bog, something that certainly in Europe and in England, you guys know about. And it preserved the organic material underneath, where we found pieces of hide, pieces of meat, edible and medicinal plants, worked wood, the bones of different mastodons that had been killed, stone tools, and the remains of what looks like Like a large tent like structure that had fallen over the years, obviously collapsed. So it was just full of all kinds of things that you normally don't get in late Ice Age Pleistocene sites. Anywhere in the world, what you normally get, maybe bones preserved, stone tools, occasionally a fire pit.

• 13:38Tristan Hughes?

  I mean, Tom, it sounds like an archaeological treasure trove. And to think, so it was only discovered back in the late 1970s with this discovery of this heart of this great Ice Age beast, this mastodon.

• 13:49Speaker 04

  Exactly. And there turned out to be remains of seven different mastodons or what we call gonfetears today. And the kill site was probably located outside of what I'm describing, which was the campsite of the people.

• 14:03Tristan Hughes?

  Well, how far back do we think the human story at Monteverdi stretches?

• 14:09Speaker 04

  Well, what I'm talking about with the preserved organic materials at the site, which kind of shocked the archaeological discipline in the Americas and beyond, dated 14,500 years ago. And that was 1500 years ahead of the most accepted paradigm or theory of the peopling of the Americas, the Clovis theory. But I'm talking about Monteverdi II. There's a Monteverdi I located nearby that has very small fire pits, a few convincing stone tools, a few bone remains, but it's not over covered by peatlands that preserved the site.

• 14:52Speaker 04

  And that dates at 16 and 18 and 24 and 33,000 years ago. So it's just scattered little ephemeral pieces of evidence in another part of the site at different depths. And that, that one, I admit. Is unproven. We need to do more archaeological and geological work on what I just described as Monteverde I, but Monteverde II overlaid by that peat layer is solid evidence.

• 15:23Tristan Hughes?

  So we'll leave Monteverde I for another day then and focus in on this amazing archaeology from Monteverde II. But Tom, if you don't mind, just before we do that, you mentioned the whole Clovis theory before the discovery of Monteverde. I mean, what was the belief about the peopling of South America, let's say before the 1980s or the 1990s, and how this new discovery kind of starts to change that?

• 15:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, if you look at the whole peopling of the Americas, it kind of follows the same pattern in Europe. Back in the late 1800s, a question came up, were humans ever associated with extinct, what we call megafauna? Here in the Americas, it would have been the American horse, giant bison, ground sloth, woolly mammoth, so forth. So the first solid evidence came out in the 30s at the Clovis site. Here in New Mexico, I'm three hours away from that site, where they found several woolly mammoths killed associated with these magnificent lancelot points with a flute in the base of it. And that was the first evidence. And that was Clovis first theory, that the first Americans are these big game hunters who

• 16:33Speaker 04

  came over from Siberia or Northeast Asia and rapidly moved throughout the Americas down into South America. And in the early 1940s, the late junior's bird of the American Museum of Natural History in New York was working in southern Patagonia, near Teatro del Fuego. And he excavated a cave called Fell's Cave. That cave yielded what's called fishtail points, projectile points. And in the base of it, allegedly kind of a flute-like removal of a flake, something similar to Clovis. And at that time in South America, the evidence was incredibly scarce.

• 17:13Speaker 04

  So the connection was made between the peopling of the north, peopling of the south. Clovis had moved very rapidly, all the way from the north down to South America in Patagonia, at Fell's Cave. And that was the theory that was set for the next 70 years or so. There's always been sites, other sites in North and South America, a few in Mexico as well, that have threatened the Clovis first paradigm or theory, but people debunked them because the proponents of Clovis are a strong-headed group of people. It was the first theory and we're going to hold on to it. So a lot of these sites were legitimately rejected.

• 17:54Speaker 04

  The radiocarbon data was questionable, the geological stratigraphy questionable, human artifacts questionable. That goes on to today. And in the late 70s through the 80s, excavating Monteberry was probably the first archaeological site in the Americas along with Metacrop Shelter in Pennsylvania that really threatened the Clovis paradigm. In around 2010 or 11, after some 30 years of excavating, Monteberry was finally accepted as the site that broke the Clovis barrier, so to speak.

• 18:28Tristan Hughes?

  Tom, you've had a hell of a battle on your hands there. Wow. Your persistence is incredibly commendable because you say now accepted. And the artifacts that are coming out from that area are extraordinary. So it must feel, maybe not even a battle, a war won over those many, many years.

• 18:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was. I mean, it was difficult at times with people, you know, Thomas Kuhn wrote a book called The Structure Scientific Revolution, talking about paradigm change in science. And he says that well entrenched models and theories like, he doesn't talk about Clovis, but we could say Clovis, takes a long, long time to overthrow those theories with a lot of evidence, a lot of persistence. There's personal attacks involved, people attacking the data. It took us about 30, 35 years to convince people. And what made it easier for me, well, it wasn't easy, let me say that, was that I was doing other projects too. And so it was kind of like my default projects that kept my mind pretty straight.

• 19:29Speaker 04

  And I just, the preponderance of evidence of interleated Monteberry convinced the discipline.

• 19:35Speaker 04

  But following Kuhn, the paradigm never completely falls until, as he says, "The last die-hard proponents of the old theory die away."

• 19:45Tristan Hughes?

  Let's explore Monteverdi now. And before the artefacts, I think it'd be best, actually, to get an idea of the landscape. Not the landscape now, but what research suggests this landscape looks like some 15,000 years ago, that might, well, I'm sure will give us more of an idea as to why this particular area seems to have been so attractive to these early people.

• 20:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, first of all, back then, the site was about 50 kilometres away from the Pacific coast, located in the headwaters of a small stream called Chichuapi, that was at the time probably about five metres wide. And it was located in a open forest, what we call a cool temperate rainforest. And what you could see back then, certainly in today from Monteverdi, are three snow-capped volcanoes, all of which are active. So the setting was quite nice. But in that area was boggy terrain, several creeks as well, a pretty well-endowed

• 20:51Speaker 04

  forest with a lot of resources. The animals would have been the mastodons we talked about, the American horse, ground sloth, and smaller game as well. But the resources we found at the site and excavated, plant remains, eggshells from birds, and other edibles, come from a radius stretching all the way out to the coast, up into the Indian mountains, 30 kilometres to the east. So it looks like these people were moving up and down a river that was located about five kilometres away called the Maoyin River, up and down that river that connected the Indian mountains in the east to the Pacific coast. And in

• 21:31Speaker 04

  fact, we found 16 different species of edible seaweeds at the site. So it's pretty strong evidence these people were beachcombers. You know, they were roaming the beaches and picking up seaweed, much like the indigenous people do today in the area. Those people are called welechi. And exploiting a lot of the wood products too. We had 13 different species of wood. Some were used in this construction, like pole frame of this tent-like structure I mentioned. Others was used for firewood, others for tools and so forth. So just incredible array of artifacts, well preserved.

• 22:10Tristan Hughes?

  You mentioned the tent first of all, and that really, really intrigues me for something that's more than 10,000 years old. So can you explain a bit more about that? And what that suggests about the nature of the site? Because I'm visiting right now something like a campsite.

• 22:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, it is. We found two structures at the site. One was isolated about 30 meters away from this longer tent-like structure. And this was wishbone shaped, where they piled up sand and rock as a foundation and pushed poles into it. And those poles were inclined toward the centerpiece and draped with animal hides. And talking about paleo llama and mastodon hides. And it collapsed, obviously. So what we found inside that hut was just one item, five masticated cud's full of medicinal plants. So what we think was is probably a medicinal hut.

• 23:07Speaker 04

  And located 30 meters away was the foundations of timbers, branches of trees laid out, kind of a rectangular fashion. Think of it like an ice tray formation. And they were staked into the ground. There were stakes that the heads were pounded flat. And the points that were down into the pushed into the ground were burned to harden the tips. And in there, and amongst that, we found small fire pits. We found edible plants, medicinal plants, chunks of meat from the mastodons that were killed, bone tools, stone tools and wood tools as well. The kind of trash that you would expect if you were camping somewhere for a long period of time.

• 23:50Speaker 04

  You see, all of this had collapsed. And what we found in both those structures on the floors were tiny microscopic pieces of hide that Was preserved because the structure obviously had collapsed over time. And we estimate in looking at the plant remains that mature during all periods of the year, that people at Monteverde II probably lived there at least 10 months, but probably close to one year.

• 24:17Tristan Hughes?

  I mean, Tom, that was going to be my question. Like, do we think that it's only occupied for the past of the year, then they're moving elsewhere and kind of almost semi nomadic. But it's interesting what you're saying there, that almost seems to be consistent use of Monteverde, which is staggering and astonishing when learning about these very early people in this area, South America.

• 24:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, when you look at the plant remains, we had 73 different edible and medicinal plant remains there, including the seaweeds. And you look at the use of the woods for different functions, firewood, making tools. There's one tree species called maki, and it's very flexible. So when the wind blows, it kind of adapts to the wind and the structure would sway a little bit, probably. The point being, these people had intimate knowledge of that forest in that setting. And that indicates that they were there for a long time before Monteverde to learn where these resources were and how to use them. And the fact that a lot of these resources come from the Indian mountains to the east,

• 25:20Speaker 04

  down toward the coast and out in a broad radius, probably suggests there were other peoples around, obviously, and they were exchanging products with them.

• 25:42Speaker 05

  If you love a good story, why aren't you listening to Dan Snow's History Hit Podcast? It's a show where we tell you every amazing, crazy and important thing that's ever happened in human history, from the perilous voyages of the first Polynesians, the discoveries of Captain Cook, the deadly Viking raids on Britain and Ireland, the rise and fall of the great English kings and queens. We'll tell you how Waterloo was won, the Alamo was lost, and all the history in between. So make sure you check it out, Dan Snow's History Hit, for the best true stories ever told, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 26:28Tristan Hughes?

  Well, this actually brings me on to another question because you mentioned earlier how so much of this material has survived in the peat material that wouldn't usually survive. So as special as Monteverdi is, should we not be thinking of, you know, oh, we found this one site, as you say, and there mustn't be any other sites in the area? It's just perhaps the soil preservation has allowed Monteverdi to survive, but we should be imagining perhaps they haven't survived, that nearby there would have been other settlements dating to a similar time, contemporary to Monteverdi too?

• 27:00Speaker 04

  That's a very good point, and that is where we're moving toward today. There are other archaeologists beginning to examine and cut banks, peat lenses, and looking for other sites. There is one possible site north of Monteverdi, about 110 kilometres away, called Pilauco, that has preserved animal bones embedded in a peat lens as well. So your point is well taken. There are probably other sites similar to it. The problem is, is that in the Americas, unlike where you're at, and in other parts of Europe, where you're accustomed to what's called wet sites, preserved by peat bogs, late sites, early sites, and

• 27:43Speaker 04

  so forth. Here in the Americas, there's only three known wet sites that have ever been excavated, two in North America, and now Monteverdi. So there's not a tradition of looking for these kinds of sites in the field, although the same kind of terrain is there to search for them.

• 28:01Tristan Hughes?

  Have there been human remains discovered from Monteverdi alongside faunal remains, alongside stone tools and so on?

• 28:10Speaker 04

  No, there have not been. First of all, if these people were there 10, 12 months, what's the likelihood of somebody dying and being buried there? So a lot of these sites are short-term occupation sites. But we did find three human footprints in the site. Somebody, probably a subadult, they're about 11cm long, walked across a patch of clay in the site, and with one of them, it's very clear, you can see the arc impression, the heel, and the five toe prints, and the other two are there. So it's right foot, left foot, right foot, across a patch of clay. But what you have brought up is a very interesting point. In the Americas, there's

• 28:49Speaker 04

  probably no more than three legitimate, well-dated, human skeleton remains, and not the complete skeleton either, in the entire Western Hemisphere, the date before 10,000 years ago. So the problem is this: what's the mortuary pattern of these first Americans? Were they dumping them in bodies of water? Are things like swamps and bogs? Were they cremating the remains and placing them somewhere else? Were they committing some form of cannibalism, then getting rid of the remains? We do not understand the mortuary patterns of the first

• 29:29Speaker 04

  Americans. And that creates a problem for the genetic studies, because the genetic analyses are going to come from mainly those human skeletons. And it's completely different from the Old World where you are: Africa, Australia, Asia, Europe. They have found numerous human skeletons of different time periods, as you well know, not in the Americas.

• 29:55Tristan Hughes?

  Very interesting indeed. Yes, in my mind, it is to be going. Here in Britain, we have a very rich record, and that has really helped us learn more about that deep prehistory of Britain, and indeed in other places. And yes, I guess then we have to focus on the artefacts that you do have at these sites in abundance. In particular, it feels like the one thing we haven't really focused on quite yet at Monteverdi, which is, Tom, the tools. What types of tools were these people using?

• 30:23Speaker 04

  The one thing that always comes to mind with these early sites: stone tools. So we've got lancelet points, projectile points, spear points, as you might want to call them. We've got stone scrapers, cutting tools, grinding stones, we're crushing plants, and a wide array of adzes and perforators with stones.

• 30:44Speaker 04

  And then in the wood area, we have what appear to be digging sticks. We found remains of wild potatoes at Montevideo, so what people use today are cow ribs are wooden sticks to dig the potatoes out. We found starch grains of potatoes on the edges of some of these wooden sticks. There's also, we found the remains of two wooden lances that had been broken and placed on top of fire pits. Seems to be some kind of decommissioning of the side or ritual, I don't know. The points of them were sharpened and burned to harden them. So there's a wide array of wooden tools and a few bone tools as well.

• 31:24Speaker 04

  Some probably used as digging sticks, quote unquote, and others kind of looked like adzes. They were breaking off the bones of the tusk of the mastodons and using those as well. And then a couple of the molars, large molars of the mastodons seemed to have been used as choppers or chopping material too. They've been crushed in a very different way than we would expect. So there's a wide array of organic and inorganic tools at the site, including the wood that was used to construct these two structures I was talking about, the tents, and also the wooden stakes as well. So it's quite a sophisticated technology.

• 32:07Tristan Hughes?

  I mean, Tom, I must admit, I'm most fascinated by those wooden tools and, you know, objects that have survived because usually those don't survive. So to imagine also those sticks potentially used to dig up wild potatoes, like a foraging stick. To me, that's even more interesting than the burned areas of the faunal remains because you just don't usually see that.

• 32:28Speaker 04

  No, you don't. That's why Montevideo, for a long time, beyond the radiocarbon dates of being 1,500 years older than Clovis, was controversial is how can you have these kinds of things? We haven't found this before and it was somewhat shocking to the discipline.

• 32:45Tristan Hughes?

  Now, I want to bring in the link with North America. As mentioned, we've done an episode recently on Humans Reaching North America with David Meltzer. And the toolkit of these first North Americans, can you see strong similarities with the toolkits, the artifacts discovered from a place like Monteverde? Or is there evidence that maybe, theory, that as humans went to South America, that they developed their different styles of tools to suit these other habitats that they were living in?

• 33:18Speaker 04

  A very good question, and you're right at the truth. As they went through different ecological zones, adapting to different places at different times, with this environment over thousands of years constantly changing, then they had to adapt their life ways, and that included consumption of different resources and different technologies. But we do see in the scrapers and the adzes and cutting stone tools and the projectile points, some degree of similarity. And also, what we find a lot of in South America, and I haven't mentioned this, are what's called bolas stones. These are spheroids that have grooves around them. And they're still used today by some of the indigenous groups in Patagonia.

• 34:00Speaker 04

  They're used as sling stones are as kind of bolas that you throw and it wraps around the legs of a bird or a small animal, or stuns them by hitting them and you capture them. These were found at Monteverde and they're found at a number of early sites in Patagonia. And they're also found at early sites along the Rio Grande in cave sites in Texas and New Mexico. So there are some similarities, yes.

• 34:26Tristan Hughes?

  We talked about the occupying of this site seemingly for most of the year. How long do we think Monteverde was occupied for? How many generations? I mean, roughly, how many years do we think Monteverde is this active place in this area of South America?

• 34:41Speaker 04

  Well, the site, going back to its geological setting, is on a high portion, the upper end of this creek, that's on a high ridge that runs from east to west. So it would be kind of a footpath from the ocean to the Andes. But Monteberry II, as I've mentioned before, may be occupied for a year. But if Monteberry I, with these different depths of minute portions of evidence suggesting a human presence off and on for another 10, 12, 15,000 years, there exists the possibility of people there long before Monteberry II at 14,500 years ago.

• 35:25Speaker 04

  It's just unproven as yet. And the problem is, once you excavate Monteberry II, it's like going from riches to rags. Because there we have this paucity of information, you know, in the deeper levels. There are some sites in Brazil and elsewhere in South America that might date 16,000 to 20, 22,000 years ago, but they're controversial as well, as is Monteberry I. And they still need to be proven. So there's hints out across the continent of people being there earlier, as there are in North America as well.

• 36:04Tristan Hughes?

  Is there any evidence that people were coming back to that place for thousands of years after that? Or has the archaeology not revealed, I mean, kind of later layers almost from that area of the world yet?

• 36:17Speaker 04

  At Monteberry, no. We have no evidence that after 14,500 years ago that people were coming back. So let me quickly insert one thing here. What we found at the site was a very thin layer of ash covering the site. About half a millimetre thickness to a millimetre in thickness in ash, probably eruptions from the volcanoes to the east. And I suspect, and I haven't published on this because it's too much speculation, but I'll say it now, that perhaps they abandoned the site as a result of volcanic eruptions, as people do today when there are volcanic eruptions. And they did not come back to the site. But there probably are other sites in the area where they were visiting other places,

• 37:02Speaker 04

  as we talked about before.

• 37:04Tristan Hughes?

  I mean, that makes it even the more extraordinary. What a fascinating snapshot this archaeology is revealing about people in this one site, some, you know, roughly 14,500 years ago. And I guess it's also exciting, you've been working there for so many years, Tom, what archaeologists might discover from that layer in the future. Do you think there's still more out there from Monteverdi II and probably from elsewhere nearby?

• 37:26Speaker 04

  Well, there is. In fact, I'm going down, I'll be excavating there at Monteverdi I in March. And there likely are more sites. It just takes more time, more resources. And also, one thing I haven't mentioned is that the team working at Monteverdi, because of the preservation of so many organic remains, is composed of almost 70 specialists. We've got insect specialists, geneticists, we've got wood specialists, seaweed specialists, so on and so forth. So to do this kind of work, it requires a big team and a lot of resources.

• 38:12Speaker 05

  If you love a good story, why aren't you listening to Dan Snow's History Hit podcast? It's a show where we tell you every amazing, crazy and important thing that's ever happened in human history, from the perilous voyages of the first Polynesians, the discoveries of Captain Cook, the deadly Viking raids on Britain and Ireland, the rise and fall of the great English kings and queens. We'll tell you how Waterloo was won, the Alamo was lost, and all the history in between. So make sure you check it out, Dan Snow's History Hit, for the best true stories ever told, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 38:58Tristan Hughes?

  Now, aside from Monteverdi, where else have archaeologists uncovered evidence for humans in South America from more than 10,000 years ago? And you know I've got one particular site in mind, but if you're happy to mention a few others, that's absolutely fine too.

• 39:12Speaker 04

  There's several sites that date around 12,000, 13,000 years ago, up and down the continent, that are... provide solid evidence. And other sites are rejected or questioned. But one side is on the Pampa, Argentina, the grasslands of Argentina, called Arroyo Seco. It dates about 14,000 years ago, excavated by Gustavo Politis, Argentinian archaeologist. Couple of sites in eastern Brazil hovering around maybe 13,000, 13,500 years ago. There's some sites up north in Colombia and Peru, Ecuador, 13, maybe 13,800 years ago. And on the coast of northern Peru, in the desert,

• 39:55Speaker 04

  Huacapieto, where I excavated with a colleague of mine, Duccio Bonavilla, Peruvian-Italian. And that dated around 14,500 years ago, maybe a little older. And what it is, is a remnant terrace of the late Pleistocene, nearly 100,000 years ago, that looks like a pitch of two soccer fields that are elevated up some five to six meters and sitting right on the ocean today. Back then, they would have been about 15 kilometers from the ocean because the sea lanes were down. But we found there shark bones, big sharks, three meters long. I don't know how they killed them or captured them,

• 40:36Speaker 04

  with large stone flakes that were seven, eight to 15 centimeters across, used for cutting. Preservation's not as good as Monteverdi. We found some seaweed there as well, in addition to collecting marine resources, shellfish and fishing as well. And the environment at that time would have been a grassland, not a desert. Today, it's a desert. But between that site... And the ocean, there were a number of estuaries and eddlets of brackish water and probably fish and sharks with high tide were coming in and we think there is how they're capturing the fish and maybe killing the sharks as well.

• 41:19Speaker 04

  Even today, in certain areas along the north coast of Peru, there are still people who use that technique. They wait until high tide. Here comes the high tide washing with the fish. They get caught in small sharks too, in low areas. So the people go out and club them today with baseball bats and you know, club them to death, take them off and eat them.

• 41:42Tristan Hughes?

  Wow. Okay. Very different sites to Monteverde. And as you say, so this is in a desert environment, is it?

• 41:48Speaker 04

  In a desert environment. Back then, it would have been a kind of a dry grassland environment. But those people were mainly exploiting the ocean, not the terrestrial resources.

• 41:58Tristan Hughes?

  How interesting. So very different to Monteverde. I've got in my notes though, earliest evidence of avocado? Question mark. Now, is this a red herring, but is this also related to the site?

• 42:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, we found later, not at 14,500, but around 10,800 years ago at Puacapieta in the later levels, still foragers, maritime foragers, terrestrial foragers. We found evidence of avocado, squash and chili pepper, all three dating about 10,500 years ago. And probably all three are non-domesticated, wild. Okay. So this is indicating again, same with the case with Monteverde. We're not just talking about people hunting big game. In this sense, it'd be sharks. We actually found one whale bone too. Well, it was probably washed up on shore, as happens today. People butchered it, consumed it.

• 42:53Speaker 04

  Now, that was in the levels of 14,000 years ago. But these people are exploiting a wide range of resources. You know, it's like they have a supermarket out there. They go into it and they're eating anything they can get their hands on.

• 43:06Tristan Hughes?

  I mean, that is absolutely extraordinary. And I guess sites like this, are they really adding so much colour? To the nature of these early communities, the term hunter-gatherers is always thrown about for pre-farming communities. I mean, how would you define these early communities in South America from archaeological work at places like Huacaprieta and Monteverdi?

• 43:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, you could throw in a number of sites from Colombia, Brazil, again, Argentina and other places. What is this indicating very early on is that these people exploited a very wide variety of not only edible plants and of course animals, large and small, but also fishing, shellfish collecting and collecting medicinal plants. I mean, let's face it, they're humans with health problems. Out there, learning what is in that environment and exploiting it probably effectively and efficiently in adapting, as we talked about before, their technology to these different and differing situations. They're a lot more

• 44:14Speaker 04

  acute and astute than we think they are. They're just not simple mobile hunters and gatherers on the move. But in working these sites, you gain a real appreciation for the intelligence and intuition of these people.

• 44:28Tristan Hughes?

  And that reminds me of something that I chatted to David about and David mentioned, which I think really is worth repeating now, is as those first humans are, let's say, emerging into North America and what is today the United States of America beyond the ice sheets, how this brave new world, brand new world, new habitats, and they're experimenting, they're having to find out what plants are edible, what aren't. And you know, that's always going on. And I'm guessing that's exactly the same with the great diversity of habitats as those people go down to South America. The amount of trial and error, so to speak, of figuring out what plants you can eat, what you can't, what marine resources are available, what animal resources are available, habitats, that would have taken

• 45:11Tristan Hughes?

  so much time. And it's another extraordinary part of the story.

• 45:14Speaker 04

  Oh, absolutely. That's why I say they have intimate knowledge of that environment. And as you say, probably a lot of it was trial and error as well. We found an interesting plant at Monteverdi, it's called Droseta sp. It's just a scientific name.

• 45:30Speaker 04

  And it comes from the steppes of Argentina, the other side of the Andes. And it's very toxic and poisonous. And today, the indigenous people have to masticate it and spit it out, let it dry in the sun. And if it can become potentially a medicinal element. But that indicated to me, and it always stuck in my mind, okay, they brought that plant back to Monteverde. Did they learn how to use it from groups in Argentina? Did they try to use it with somebody sick from it? Did they abandon that plant? And it gets to the very point of trial and error with anything out there in the environment. And one point I'll make here is I work with the local Mapuche indigenous people.

• 46:15Speaker 04

  And I talk with the shamans down there who are healers and ritual people and so forth. And the shamans, I asked them the same question. How did you learn about the plants, the edibles and the medicinals? They said, we learned it from the animals. We watched what they eat and then we tried it out.

• 46:35Tristan Hughes?

  So we've had a look at Monteverde and Huaca Prieta and this incredible archaeological material that you have surviving. I'm really glad we got you on the podcast now because it's an exciting time. This is a difficult question, but with the current archaeological material available, what is our best guess about the nature as to how humans populated South America? Would you think predominantly Pacific coast or I mean, what do we think?

• 47:01Speaker 04

  Good question. I've always thought that there were multiple avenues into South America. First, you have to think about the Panamanian Ithmus. It's very narrow as you come out of southern Panama, the Driyan forest into Colombia. That's the bridge into South America. And they could have come along the Pacific coast. They could have come along the Atlantic coast or just over land or a mixture of those. You know, the people in South America, there's two theories. One, they came along the waterway, the Pacific, but you have to throw in the Atlantic as well, that side. And by land, so I'm a believer in multiple pathways. You know, it could be any or all of those.

• 47:45Tristan Hughes?

  Well, it's very exciting therefore for the future as more archaeological work is done by yourself and many colleagues, both in North America and absolutely in South America too. I must admit, I knew next to nothing about Monteverdi. I'd never heard of Huayca Puyetta before, before looking at your research, Tom. So this has been eye opening for me. How big a task is it to get this knowledge out into the world about prehistoric South America and the populating of South America?

• 48:16Speaker 04

  It's been difficult, not only for me in some ways, but colleagues. I mean, South American colleagues, for their data to be evaluated and eventually accepted, much of it has to be published in English. There's a certain degree of what I call academic imperialism that still operates in the world, where there seems to be this notion of, well, first of all, not a lot of North Americans read Portuguese or Spanish, so they're going to have to read things in English. But I think that it's a discipline that's growing very quickly. It's one of the hot topics in anthropology. And getting this information out, archaeology

• 48:59Speaker 04

  is, I've hinted at, and as you well know, is a discipline that requires a lot of interdisciplinary research and a lot of resources. But these sites are not easy to find either. Monteverdi found me, I didn't find Monteverdi. It came to me vis a vis the student. And a lot of sites are like that. Farmers and fishermen find sites and so forth. But I think there needs to be, and I say that, more systematic archaeological survey and reconnaissance by archaeologists out across well-defined paleo landscapes. Because when we look out there at that landscape, and as you alluded to earlier, that is very different in the

• 49:39Speaker 04

  past 12, 14, 15,000 years or more ago than it is today. And we need to learn that landscape and learn how to research it. But, you know, times are exciting. There's more interdisciplinary data coming into view. Genetics is exciting. New techniques with LiDAR technology.

• 50:00Tristan Hughes?

  That's penetrating beneath the thick tree cover, isn't it, to LiDAR, Tom?

• 50:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. And you get a better reading what The landscape was like in addition to the archaeology. So I encourage young people to go into any discipline that relates to this theme, archaeology in general.

• 50:16Tristan Hughes?

  Well, Tom, that's a lovely way for us to finish this episode. It just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today.

• 50:24Speaker 04

  I enjoyed it a great deal. Thank you.

• 50:29Tristan Hughes?

  Well, there you go. There was Dr. Tom Dillahay talking through the archaeology surrounding the first evidence for humans in South America and why it's such an exciting area of archaeology right now and really exciting discoveries, no doubt, will be coming out of South America in the years ahead. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Ancients. Please follow this show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour. Don't forget, you can also listen to us and all of History Hit's podcasts ad free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com/subscribe. That's enough from me and I will see you in the next episode.