More than 20,000 years ago, in what is now Argentina, some of the first inhabitants of the Americas found and used stone tools to slaughter a giant armadillo-like creatureaccording to a new study.
The discovery, inferred from cut marks on the fossilized remains of the ice age creature, is significant because it adds to a series of recent finds that suggest the Americas were populated much earlier than archaeologists initially thought — perhaps longer ago. 25,000 years old.
“These beings are closely related to still-living armadillos,” said Miguel Delgado, co-author of the study and researcher at the National University of La Plata, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The animals are known for their armored scales and ability to curl up into a ball when threatened.
“The specimen we found belongs to one of the smallest species (of an extinct type of armadillo called Neosclerocalyptus),” said Delgado, noting that its weight was about 300 kilograms and its length was 180 centimeters, including the tail.
A tractor exposed the animal’s fossilized vertebrae and pelvis, discovered on the banks of the Reconquista River, near the city of Merlo, in the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Radiocarbon dates from bivalve bones and shells found in the same layer of sediment revealed that the armadillo remains were between 20,811 and 21,090 years old, according to the study published Wednesday in PLOS One magazine.
The cuts were not immediately evident, but cleaning the fossils revealed 32 linear marks. After careful analysis, the team ruled out that the marks were made by rodents, carnivores that could have preyed on the animals or other factors such as trampling, Delgado said.
Instead, the team determined that the shape of the cut marks was consistent with those made by stone tools. The location of the marks suggests that the animals were slaughtered for their meat with a deliberate sequence of cuts that focused on dense areas of the armadillo’s flesh, according to the study’s co-author.
“The cut marks were not randomly distributed, but focused on those skeletal elements that housed large muscular packages, such as the pelvis and tail,” he said.
The authors provided “compelling evidence” that people shot this extinct armadillo 21,000 years ago, said paleoanthropologist Briana Pobiner, a research scientist in the Human Origins Program at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., in the United States.
“The researchers did a solid job of demonstrating, through qualitative and quantitative analysis, that the cut marks on the armadillo fossils were most likely made by humans,” Pobiner, who was not involved in the study, said in an email.
First humans in the Americas
When and how the first humans migrated to North and South America, the last places to be populated as humans moved out of Africa and spread across the world, has been long debated by experts and remains poorly understood.
Current estimates for the earliest inhabitants range from 13,000 years ago to more than 20,000 years ago, but the earliest archaeological evidence for the settlement of the region is scant and often controversial.
The discovery of fossilized footprints imprinted in mud 21,000 to 23,000 years old in New Mexico, described in a September 2021 study, is the most definitive in a series of recent evidence suggesting that the arrival of the first inhabitants was much earlier than many scientists thought.
During this period, the planet was under the influence of the Last Glacial Maximum, a period between 19,000 and 26,000 years ago when two immense ice sheets covered the northern third of North America, reaching as far south as what is now the city from New York, Cincinnati and Des Moines, Iowa.
The ice sheets and cold temperatures caused by the glacial masses would have made a journey between Asia and Alaska — the most likely route — impossible during this period, meaning the people who left the footprints likely arrived much earlier.
Along with three pierced giant sloth bones found in Brazil, which archaeologists believe humans wore as pendants 25,000 to 27,000 years ago, the slaughtered armadillo bones suggest that humans were in South America a surprisingly long time ago.
The timing of when humans first settled in the Americas, then home to many now-extinct ice age creatures, has been an “intensely debated topic,” Delgado said.
“Until recently, the traditional model indicated that humans entered the continent 16,000 years ago,” he commented.
“Our results, together with other evidence, propose a different scenario for the first human settlement of the American continent, that is, the most likely date for the first human entry occurred between 21,000 and 25,000 years ago, or even earlier.”
Species of fish named after villain from “The Lord of the Rings”
Share:
