Did the human being populate America more recently than believed?

One of the most heated debates in archeology about America has to do with where and when the first human beings entered the continent. While many support the theory that it occurred through the Bering Strait, in the middle of the ice age and 14,000 years ago, others bet, for example, on hypotheses that include the arrival through the Pacific Ocean by canoes about 50,000 years ago.

A team of Argentine scientists made up of Agustín Agnolín and Federico Agnolín, from the Institute of Latin American Anthropology and Thought, the Argentine Museum of Natural Sciences, the Azara Foundation and CONICET (National Council for Scientific and Technical Research) of Argentina, has completed an investigation whose conclusions They demolish this second theory. The evidence? The amazing ability of capuchin monkeys to create tools similar to those used by ancient humans.

“In the Brazilian cave known as Pedra Furada, remains of stone instruments dating back approximately 50,000 years had been found. These excessively simple instruments were interpreted as the result of the activity of ancient men and were an enigma for most of the specialists If they were true, they provided evidence that man had inhabited American soil 40,000 years earlier than we all thought,” says Agnolín.

According to specialists, the strongest evidence supporting the theory that the population of America began 50,000 years ago is centered on tools found in a series of caves and deposits located in the Northeast of Brazil. However, judging by recent research, these pieces could have been created by monkeys and not humans.

The specialists decided to compare the stone tools that supported the second theory and that were found in Pedra Furada, one of the great archaeological sites located in the Northeast of Brazil, and those that capuchin monkeys make today. The result was surprising: there was no difference between the tools of 50,000 years ago and those produced by the monkeys.

Capuchin Monkey fracturing fruits using a rock as a hammer and another as an anvil at an archaeological site with cave paintings in northeastern Brazil. (Photo: Tiago Falótico)

“Recent research carried out in Africa, Asia and South America shows that the ability to make stone tools is not exclusive to humans. In fact, capuchin monkeys use rocks as anvils and hammers to crack nuts, so these tools are the result of repeated impacts between a boulder and a flat surface of quartzite rock,” explains Agnolín in dialogue with the CTyS-UNLaM Agency. .

This discovery -along with the absence of unequivocal human records such as homes, exotic raw materials, traces of bones, among others- reinforces the classical view that the first humans arrived on the American continent about 14,000 years ago from Asia, crossing through the Bering strait.

The study is titled “Holocene capuchin-monkey stone tool deposits shed doubts on the human origin of archeological sites from the Pleistocene of Brazil”. And it has been published in the scholarly journal The Holocene. (Source: Magalí de Diego / CTyS Agency / CONICET)