THE CAVES OF SERRA DA CAPIVARA
Where did the first Americans really come from?
Hidden away in the wilds of Serra da Capivara National Park in northeast Brazil lies one of the most important archaeological sites in the Americas. Many of the rock shelters inside the park’s caves are decorated with paintings, some of them more than 25,000 years old. They give the lie to the widely held 20-century belief that the Americas were first settled by Asians. Many young Americans are still taught in school that the first settlers crossed a land bridge over the Bering Strait from Siberia to Alaska that existed during the last ice age—a time when the sea levels were lower—and made their way southward as the glaciers retreated. That belief was based on the discovery in the 1920s and ’30s of prehistoric stone tools found near Clovis, New Mexico. The speculation about the migration from Asia came to be known as the “Clovis First” hypothesis, and radioactive dating assigned it to a period about 13,000 years ago. In the intervening years, the hypothesis has been challenged by the discovery of even older signs of human habitation in the Americas such as southern Chile’s Monte Verde site, which was discovered in 1975 and later found to date back to as early as 18,500 years ago. However
Serra da Capivara National Park has the oldest examples of rock art in all the Americas, dating back some 25,000 years, along with evidence that human settlement there may be at least twice that old.
The region of the caves has been extensively explored by the Brazilian archaeologist Niède Guidon. Now 88 years old, she has been exploring sites in the area since the 1970s and is credited with the discovery that human habitation in that section of northeastern Brazil predates that of Clovis by tens of thousands of years. So where did those first Americans actually come from? Guidon has her own hypothesis: by boat from Africa by taking advantage of the South Equatorial Current, which pushes warm water from West Africa toward the coast of Brazil. In any case, the schoolbooks will require revision: The New World was evidently settled much earlier than previously taught.