Abstract
Eastern South America, or what is today Brazilian territory, poses interesting questions about the early human occupation of the Americas. Three totally distinct and contemporaneous lithic technologies, dated between 11,000 and 10,000 14C BP, are present in different portions of the country: the Umbu tradition in the south, with its formal bifacial industry, with well-retouched scrapers and bifacial points; the Itaparica tradition in the central-west / northwest, totally unifacial, whose only formal artifacts are limaces; and the "Lagoa Santa" industry, completely lacking any formal artifacts, composed mainly of small quartz flakes. Our data suggests that these differences are not related to subsistence or raw-material constraints, but rather to different cultural norms and transmission of strongly divergent chaînes opératoires. Such diversity in material culture, when viewed from a cultural transmission (CT) theory standpoint, seems at odds with a simple Clovis model as the origin of these three cultural traditions given the time elapsed since the first Clovis ages and the expected population structure of the early South American settlers.
Highlights
One of the most remarkable features of the debate about the origins of the First Americans is a deep lack of communication between scientists from the northern and southern portions of the continent
The main objective of this paper is to update information about the earliest human occupations that happen to be located in what is today Brazilian territory
If everything we find in eastern South America is derived from a single culture, what is the reason for such a departure from the “norm”? Why did the ancestors of South American Paleoindians give up their world views, and completely change their chaines opératoires or “recipes” in such a short time? Modifications in the whole structure of a lithic industry is not to be taken lightly
Summary
One of the most remarkable features of the debate about the origins of the First Americans is a deep lack of communication between scientists from the northern and southern portions of the continent. The reasons for this state of the art are manifold, and it is not the aim of this communication to delve into them. The main objective of this paper is to update information about the earliest human occupations that happen to be located in what is today Brazilian territory. The last effort to publish data about this issue for an English-speaking audience was made more than a decade ago (Kipnis 1998), a more recent
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