Bones by Elaine Dewar

Author:Elaine Dewar [Dewar, Elaine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-37555-1
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2001-11-27T05:00:00+00:00

15

Brazilian Edens

The Sheltered Finds of Minas Gerais

I LOOKED AT THE MAP and down at the ground. I was an hour as the plane flies northeast of São Paulo, over the state of Minas Gerais, not far from its capital, Belo Horizonte. Hidden among the green hills, which spread below the wings of the jet like a crumpled velvet bedspread, lay Lagoa Santa and the rock shelter and crevice that had harbored Luzia. Three hundred kilometers to the north at a place called Santana do Riacho was a rock shelter covered with paintings, with dates going back to the end of the Ice Age; 700 kilometers farther to the north and east was Lapa do Boquete, surrounded by sixteen archaeological sites within eleven square kilometers, covered with rock art of every description; and farther northeast still lay the most impressive rock shelter/archaeological site of them all, Boqueirão da Pedra Furada, in the neighboring state of Piaui. I plotted the dots and they formed a line headed northeast (or southwest, depending on point of view). They were all fairly close to the São Francisco River, which begins in the Serra da Canastra range, southwest of Belo Horizonte, and empties into the Atlantic in the northeast, near Recife.

These archaeological sites, hundreds of kilometers inland and a long way south of the equator, made nonsense of the Clovis First theory. To get to Minas Gerais from somewhere in the southern reaches of Siberia on foot would have taken many generations adapting to vast environmental changes as they moved across a huge landscape, yet Luzia had died on the earth below this plane about 11,500 BP. No Crane people flew her there.

I added up the physical barriers: the tundralike or inundated Bering Strait (depending on when people entered); the mountains running down most of the North American coast; the mountains of Mexico and the jungles of Central America; the Andes; the almost continent-wide Amazon system, surrounded by a vast rain forest; a range of southern mountains; and then eventually the São Francisco river. Paddling up such a river was easy compared to walking all that way. Yet archaeologists and physical anthropologists who found, through the use of measurement and statistics, an affinity between the early Lagoa Santa population and people in Africa and Australia, still insisted that their ancestors had come over the Bering Strait.

It seemed to me that they simply refused to shake loose the last constraints of an intellectual prison. The Bering Strait theory did not provide a useful framework, or narrative, to explain the human remains found in the ground. Yet they held on to it the way old prisoners find ways to stay in detention. I knew all the reasons. Everyone wanted to be prudent. No one wanted to fight a battle on more than one front at a time. It was hard enough to stand up in public and declare that the oldest human remains in the Americas were not Mongoloid, were in fact closer in shape to ancient Australians and ancient Africans than to modern Native Americans.

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