54. Possible Relatives in the Americas
Laguna Tagua Tagua site (Liberador, Chile)
by George Weber
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The location of the Laguna Tagua Tagua archaeological site on the shores of the (long dried out ) Laguna seca de San Vicente de Tagua Tagua (to give it its full name) is ca. 140 km (90 miles) south south west of the Chilean capital, Santiago de Chile, and ca. 50 km ( 31 miles) southwest of Rancagua.
8 km of San Vicente de Tagua Tagua is also the smaller archaeological site of Cuchipuy.
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Tagua Tagua is a pleistocene kill site where ancient humans butchered large animals they had hunted down, perhaps with the help of dogs since remains of man's earlierst helper have been found at the site.
The site was discovered in the 1860s when the lake level had sunk so much that large bones (most notably from an extinct type of mammoth, Cuvieronius humboldti , known as mastodon) appeared on what had been the lake bed. The true nature and age of the bone assemblies was only realized in the 1930s when stone tools were found on the site and cut-marks on the bones were recognized as ancident butchering marks. The earliest dates of the kill-site ite go back to around 12,000 years.
The area of Lake Tagua Tagua today has a Mediterranean-type climate with winter rains and an eight-month dry season. During the late pleistocene ice age, the climate changed and the mastodons increasingly retreated to lake environments for their foraging - where human hunters waited for them.
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A mastodon bone next to an archaeologist's tool.
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There are two main strata in the site that contain human artefacts:
(1) an upper, younger stratum at at around 1 m below the surface, dating to hunters aon the edge of becoming agriculturalists
(2) a lower, much older stratum at around 2.4 m containing chipped stone tools and remains of an extinct fauna of horse and mastodon as wel as of smaller animals such as frogs, birds, fish and rodents. The bones of many of the larger animals show distinct cut marks from human tools or they have been splintered to get at the bone marrow. The animal remains have been scattered in a random manner that speak of human activity. Stone tools are scattered throughout the stratum but occur only close to animal remains.The oldest date found was around 11,500 years before the present.
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View of a mastodon butchering site.
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It is unlikely that humans were the only or even the main cause for the mastodon's extinction in the early holocene. There was a dramatic change of the climate and vegetation, reflecting a shift toward a drier and warmer climate. Sub-Antarctic grasses and plants favoured by mastodons disappeared and were replaced by the herbs and grasses diagnostic of a much more arid environment.
Mastodon herds seem to have foraged separately by sex, coming together only in Spring to mate. At that time there must have been enormous concentrations of these huga animals around Lake Tagua Tagua - and human hunters made full use of their opportunities. They not only scavenged dead and injured animals but also killed themselves using "fish-tail" projectile points (also called Fell points, see Fell's Cave). Other tools found were stone knives and scrapers. At two sites around Lake Tague-Tagua, the remains of no less than 15 mastodons associated with Fell points were found. The points had been made from a variety of local minerals (obsidian, opal, quartz crystals, basalt and agate) and other tools were also made of mastodon bone.
Many mastodon skulls had been broken open, apparently to get at the particularly nutritious brain of the animals.
Below:
The oldest stone tools found at Tagua-Tagua were these relative primitive types thought to around 11,500 years old. The tools were designed for cutting and scraping meat off bones (adapted from Julio Montané, "Palaeo-Indian Remains from Laguna de Tagua Tagua, Central Chile, Science, 1968, 161: 1137-1138)
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The bones of butchered animals were, of course, also used as tools. Shown here are bones of horses. Some bones were highly polished, indicating that the hunters sharpened their tools on the site as and when required during the butchering process. |
Flecks of charcoal have been dated to 11,380 ± 380 years before the present. In view of selectively burnt mastodon bones it is reasonale to assume that these came from fires lighted by the hunters.
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Last change 15 March 2007
