Big Game Hunting in Argentina 14,000 Years Ago

Megatherium By Heinrich Harder (1858–1935) (The Wonderful Paleo Art of Heinrich Harder) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Original Source: Politis GG, Gutiérrez MA, Rafuse DJ, Blasi A (2016) The Arrival of Homo sapiens into the Southern Cone at 14,000 Years Ago. PLoS ONE 11 (9): e0162870. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0162870

14,000 years ago in modern day Argentina the sounds of stone hitting bone echo. Hunters are cutting the limbs from a giant land sloth. The creature weighs over 3 tons and is too heavy to carry. The hunters will separate the arms and legs from the body along with other parts of prime meat. They transport their prize to a nearby knoll. Here they will break down the prey even more. They have visited here before. On the knoll, they remove the meat from the bones, and skin the hides. This scene will play out numerous times over the millennia. The bones will lie exposed to the elements until eventually buried with time. The hunters leave behind just a few pieces of stone.

When the first peoples entered, the America’s has been a contested topic since the beginnings of American archaeology. The long accepted consensus is that humans first colonized the America’s 12,000 years before the present by a people called by scientists Clovis. The confidence in this assertion has been eroding away for the twenty years. There is now a growing list of sites from North and South America that predate Clovis people. A recent paper in the online Journal Plos One adds the AS2 site in Argentina to the list.

The importance of the AS2 site is twofold. The excavation has produced 55 radiocarbon dates. Archaeologists now have a clear time frame for the occupation of the site. The archaeologists recovered a significant number of extinct Pleistocene (last ice age) mammal bones. The hunting and use of the extinct animals are another long-standing debate. The AS2 site sheds new light on the animals and human interaction with them.

People were active at the AS2 site for thousands of years. There were twenty-six human skeletons recovered dating from 9,000 to 5,000 years before the present. These skeletons postdate the end of the Pleistocene. The earliest human activity dates to 14,000 years ago. 2,000 years before the Clovis people first appear in North America.

The site gives a very clear picture of the interaction of human hunters and ice age mammals. The archaeologists excavated numerous skeletons. These include species of extinct American horse (Equus neogeus, Hippidion), giant land sloths (Megatherium, Glyptodon), and American Camel (Camelidae Hemiauchenia).

Archaeologists can piece together the story of AS2 based on these remains. A majority of bone come from the parts of the animal most likely to be eaten. These include the limbs (tibia, humerus, femur). Researchers believe that the animals were killed nearby and then brought to the knoll, processing the meat into manageable chunks. The meat would then be dried and brought back to the primary camp. The absence of bone from other parts of the animal such as teeth, cranium, or vertebrae leads researchers to the conclusion AS2 was not the primary kill site.

The AS2 is an important piece in our understanding of the first humans in the America’s. The secure dating gives us a timeline when the first settlers arrived in Argentina.The site reveals a clear picture of the hunter-gather use of Pleistocene animals. The evidence of specialized activity allows us to tell the story of how humans used an unassuming hill 14,000 years ago.