Recently recovered FarShores file Jan 2007
Many of America's earliest settlers may have been digging clams and netting fish rather than throwing spears at mammoths. About 12,000 years ago, the residents of a pair of coastal communities in what is now southern Peru were exploiting the ocean for a living--feasting on fish, seabirds and shellfish--in the earliest evidence of maritime-based societies in this hemisphere, according to two studies in the journal Science.
"It really gives a lot more evidence to the theory that very early migration to America could have taken place along a coastal route by people who were fishers rather than big game hunters," said David Keefer of the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, Calif. "It could change the view of what the earliest Americans were really like."
The most common theory for the populating of America has been hunters crossing the frozen Bering Strait and moving through the interior of the continent on foot. The settlements studied by teams headed by Keefer and Daniel Sandweiss of the University of Maine at Orono existed slightly earlier than the Clovis Culture of big-game hunters in North America, those ancient folks so often pictured in books, armed with spears and confronting mammoths.
What the research shows, Sandweiss said, is that "people were interested in exploiting all different kinds of food sources from almost as soon as they arrived in the Americas. . . . They saw opportunities in potential diet and they went for it. That's something we thought before, but . . . we can prove it now."
For archeologist Betty Meggers at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History, the findings, published Friday, confirm her suspicions. Researchers have long expected to find such sites, she said, but many of them were probably destroyed by rising sea levels over the centuries. "I think that we're just getting down to a reasonable view of what was going on," said Meggers, who was not part of the research teams. "These people made use of whatever was available."
In the newly studied area of Peru, the sea floor drops off steeply, so when sea levels rose at the end of the last ice age, little land was lost horizontally -- leaving remains of communities that existed near the coast. No remains of boats were found, but the researchers discovered fishing nets and cutting tools and were able to date the settlement from the charcoal left behind.
"The biggest surprise was how overwhelmingly the material was maritime," Keefer said, adding that "99.8 percent of the bones and shells were fish, shellfish and seabirds." These people were "overwhelmingly specialized for gathering food from the sea," he said.
These ancient people built their hearths, chipped stone tools and pulled a living from the sea thousands of years before the creation of Stonehenge in England or the rise of the earliest civilizations in the near east. Keefer's site, called Quebrada Tacahuay, was about a half-mile from the shore and was probably chosen because of available fresh water, he said. "We have found evidence of the use of fire and cooking, but no other evidence of permanent settlement," he said.Sandweiss' site was a few miles inland, located where a seasonal stream flows down from the highlands into the coastal desert.
