Experts are reassessing prehistoric Pleistocene-era locations in Brazil that were previously thought to be home to ancient people. The 50,000-year-old stone tools uncovered in digs were most likely made by capuchin monkeys, not early humans.
We think that the early archaeological sites in Brazil may not be from human beings, but may be from capuchin monkeys.
The archaeologists have found pieces of stone tools at Pedra Furada, an 800 archaeological site in the state of Piauí, Brazil. These tools are from the Stone Age, which means they date back to before humans started to live in the Western Hemisphere. The tools look like the tools that are currently made by the capuchin monkeys at Brazil’s Serra da Capivara National Park.
Monkeys have their own rock quarries where they choose boulders large enough to be used as hammers on a larger, flattened anvil rock to crack nuts. These rocks may also be used to consume seeds and fruits, as well as lick the dust produced by driving two boulders together.
Stone tools are beneficial to capuchins, who use them for a variety of tasks, such as digging. Females also use rocks to communicate their sexual interest to potential mates.
The study found that the breaking of stones into smaller pieces can lead to their appearance being indistinguishable from some ancient stone tools that were carved by early humans. This process can occur through a number of different processes, all of which can lead to the stones breaking into smaller flaked pieces. This means that the stones could potentially look like ancient stone tools, which could lead to people believing that these tools were actually created by early humans.
“Our work demonstrates that the tools from Pedra Furada and other surrounding sites in Brazil were nothing more than the product of capuchin monkeys cracking nuts and pebbles around 50,000 years ago,” Federico Agnoln, a researcher at Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council, said (CONICET).
The hypothesis that monkeys were responsible for the human-looking lithic deposits at Pedra Furada was presented for the first time in 2017 by archaeologist Stuart J. Fiedel in the journal PaleoAmerica, who noted that capuchins may have been utilizing tools for 100,000 years. In 2018, similar issues were raised in the journal Quaternaire.
A 2019 study published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution found that capuchin monkeys in the Serra da Capivara are the first primates to use stone tools to hunt. The study found that the monkeys use stone tools to break open nuts and extract the seeds.
The tools at the site lack other evidence of human habitation from 50,000 years ago, such as concrete traces of dietary remains or hearths—charcoal at the site could have originated from naturally occurring fires. The tools’ resemblance to rock fragments created by monkeys raises the possibility that monkeys were responsible for their creation.
The new findings could have a significant impact on our understanding of when the first humans arrived in the Americas. The Pleistocene archeological sites from Brazil are some of the most compelling evidence that people lived on the continents prior to the end of the last Ice Age.
The Clovis First theory says that glaciers stopped people from settling in the Western Hemisphere until around 14,000 years ago. But there are now archaeological sites that show people were living in the Americas much earlier than that. Some people think that during the Ice Age, people started settling along a coastal entry route.
Some scientists have questioned whether the footprints at White Sands National Park are really from people that long ago, and it seems that the seeds used to date them may have been contaminated with old carbon. This means that the true date of when people were living there may be a little bit older than we thought.
Recently, Brazil’s capuchin monkeys have been doing a lot of research that suggests that the Pre-Clovis people were probably not the first people to live on Earth.
The new evidence suggests that the human settlement of this part of the American continent is more recent than previously thought, and it supports the idea that it arrived about 13,000 or 14,000 years ago. This means that some of the previous hypotheses about the age of the human settlement of South America may need to be revised.
