As interior decorators, cave dwellers in Brazil’s Amazonian rain forest 11,000 years ago were as spectacularly messy as they were creative.
Both traits are part of an astonishing archeological portrait that a researcher with the Field Museum of Natural History says could transform theories of how the first humans arrived at and dispersed through the Americas and how humans have been upsetting rain forest ecology ever since.
Ultimately the tale of how life took hold in the Brazilian rain forest may point to a whole new theory of where and how early humans first evolved in Africa.
Based on years of research on fantastic figures left behind by prehistoric artists on the ceiling and walls of caves near Monte Alegre, Brazil, the findings by archeology curator Anna Roosevelt are published in Friday’s issue of the research journal Science.
A widely admired scholar with a bravura adventuring spirit akin to her great-grandfather, Teddy Roosevelt, the Rough Rider American president, Anna Roosevelt, 50, also teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
“It’s lucky they were very messy,” says Roosevelt of the Amazonian cave painters, who apparently allowed iron oxide-based paints to drip and drizzle from the ceilings to the cave floors. “The messier they are, the better it is for archeologists.”
In fact, it was the paint drippings on the cave floors that allowed Roosevelt and an international team of researchers to accurately nail down how long ago the cave was first inhabited. The dating of the splattered paint on the floor matched that of the ceiling paint. With dating of stone spear points and carbonized animal and plant remains in the cave, they know it was occupied for 1,200 years, beginning about 11,200 years ago.
That would make the cave paintings among the oldest, if not the oldest, in the Americas. By comparison, the famous Lascaux cave paintings in France date to 13,000 to 15,000 B.C.
“We know whole families were living there,” Roosevelt says. “They left handprints in red paint, from the large hands of men, to smaller hands of women and adolescents, to fat, pudgy toddler handprints.”
The artistry of many of the paintings, Roosevelt says, is as striking as it is mysterious, including figures that are part human and part animal or insect. Some have human bodies but only a large eye for a face, positioned as though they might be flying through the sky as if they were comets. All of them indicate some sort of religious or belief system.
“There are caves throughout this area of Brazil, so many with bold, absolutely glorious paintings,” says Roosevelt. “They are absolutely spectacular and unusual.”
The paintings are also very unlike anything done by the so-called “Clovis” people, the group of Asians that until now archeologists generally theorized were the first humans to populate the Americas.
According to that theory, the Clovis people came when Alaska and Russia were connected by a land bridge, about 11,200 years ago. The Clovis people slowly spread through North America, down through Central America, and eventually into South America.
Roosevelt’s cave paintings, also dating back 11,200 years ago, will throw the Clovis people theory open for re-examination. Further, the Clovis people were not cave painters and made entirely different kinds of tools and spear points from those found in the Monte Alegre cave.
Roosevelt says the Clovis people (named after a style of spear points found near Clovis, N.M.) and the Monte Alegre cave people were separate cultures living and spreading out at the same time.
“Clovis people may be one of many cultures that migrated to the Americas, perhaps along different routes,” she says.
The new findings hint that some of the early migrations may have come by sea, rather than by the land bridge, though all indications are that all migrations came from Asia, she says. As yet, the earliest known evidence of any seaworthy vessels among early man are from rock drawings in Egypt dating to 6000 B.C.
At the root of Roosevelt’s research is her long-held belief that rain forests have always been ignored by archeology even though they are the most natural place for early human activity. Conventional archeological wisdom, she says, maintains that rain forests were uninhabitable for early humans, who developed complex societies in grasslands and semi-forested areas.
“Why wouldn’t people be attracted to the rain forests?” asks Roosevelt. “It is an Eden where you can pluck fish from the streams and fruits and vegetables from the forests. The only reason archeologists in the past have believed there wasn’t much going on in the rain forests is that no archeologists looked there very hard before.”
Roosevelt began looking hard about 20 years ago, attracted by spear points she found in museum collections from the Amazon basin that didn’t fit with the cultures they were attributed to. After hearing of cave paintings described by 19th Century scientists, she devoted her career to the river basin.
Aided, in part, by a five-year MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant in 1988, Roosevelt in 1991 published startling finds of exquisite pottery found in the caves. The pottery came, however, from a more highly evolved fishing culture that inhabited the cave thousands of years after the original cave dwellers.
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The caves are in sandstone hills 600 to 900 feet high, overlooking the Amazon at a place where the river is 12 feet wide. The cave principal to Roosevelt’s study, the Caverna da Pedra Pintada (cavern of painted stone), is a roomy, rectangular chamber 20 feet high, 45 feet long and 30 feet wide.
A little spring supplies water near the cave, which also has a trickle of water dropping from the roof inside the cave itself.
The original cave dwellers, Roosevelt says, used the cave at least on a regular seasonal basis, lured by ripening fruits and nuts that they consumed or to hunt game that was attracted by the plants.
Their diets consisted in part of fruits, nuts and vegetables gathered from the forest. They used boats, poison, traps and spears to fish, she says. Evidently all members took part in gathering small game, including rats, turtles, bats, clams, snakes and birds, for food.
“Many of the species of turtles and rodents we see in our excavations were juveniles,” Roosevelt says. “Women and children would do a lot of that collecting.”
The evidence around the Monte Alegre caves shows that from those first human habitations, people have been rearranging the rain forest, gradually clustering species of plants and trees valuable to them for food.
“Much recent research in the Amazon shows that so-called `virgin’ tropical forests were in fact settled and cultivated for many thousands of years,” she says.
“The native people know those trees and plants far better than scientists. If we want to preserve the forests, we should allow people to continue to practice sustainable agriculture within the forest. They are integral to the forest ecology.”
Roosevelt says she is so confident of her evolving theory of rain forests being central to the evolution of early man, she would like to study the rain forests in Africa. The earliest prehumans so far on record, like the 3-million-year-old Lucy found in the savannas of East Africa, are actually physiologically more suited for climbing and living in trees, she notes.
“They were climbers, not efficient walkers,” Roosevelt says of the African hominids. “The most accepted theory now is that the savanna was the home of the hominids, that the forest represented a dead end for them.
“But why? It would make sense that hominids first would evolve in the forests where finding food is easy, moving later into the savanna. Nobody has ever looked in the rain forests in Africa. I have a feeling we’re going to end up there looking, ourselves, in Zaire.”
In the meantime, Roosevelt says the work of her team in the Amazon will broaden to underwater excavations to find evidence that some of the earliest migrants to America arrived by water.