{"id":204460,"date":"2015-12-02T15:10:35","date_gmt":"2015-12-02T17:10:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/?p=204460"},"modified":"2015-12-02T17:36:23","modified_gmt":"2015-12-02T19:36:23","slug":"new-pieces-of-the-puzzle-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/new-pieces-of-the-puzzle-2\/","title":{"rendered":"New pieces of the puzzle"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"037-039_Cien_Arqueologia_Eng227-02\"<\/a>Published in January 2015<\/em><\/p>\n

Two teeth from a large deer discovered at a prehistoric site in the vicinity of the Serra da Capivara National Park in S\u00e3o Raimundo Nonato, southern Piau\u00ed State, will likely add fuel to the debate regarding the date of modern man\u2019s arrival in the Americas. Two different laboratories independently dated these giant mammal remains, which were discovered at a depth of slightly over half a meter in the same geological layer of Toca do Serrote das Moendas in which human bones were recovered. One tooth was analyzed at the Department of Physics of the Riber\u00e3o Preto Faculty of Philosophy, Science, Languages and Literature, which is part of the University of S\u00e3o Paulo (FFCLRP\/USP); the other tooth was examined at the Department of Chemistry of Williams College in Massachusetts. The results of both tests indicate similar results: 29,000 years in the first case and 24,000 in the second. At the Baixada Santista campus of the Federal University of S\u00e3o Paulo (Unifesp), a third group ascertained the age of the concretion, that is, a compact layer rich in carbonates capping the sediments, in which the animal teeth and human skeleton fragments were discovered. As expected, the latter test confirmed that the concretion layer was younger than the layer that contained the animal remains: the soil sample was 21,000 years old. Equipment purchased with FAPESP funding was used in the two dating measurements performed in Brazil.<\/p>\n

Based on the results of these three tests, the researchers believe that they have gathered indirect evidence of human presence at least 20,000 years ago in what is today the semi-arid northeast region of Brazil, which is well before the date that traditional archeology posits for the peopling of the Americas. \u201cThe three dates line up,\u201d says physicist Oswaldo Baffa, coordinator of the Ribeir\u00e3o Preto\/USP group and one of the study\u2019s authors. \u201cTo mitigate any possible criticism, we were careful to have the samples analyzed at three different places, where they worked blind, without knowing exactly what they were analyzing.\u201d The classic view, as advocated by US groups, posits that the first Homo sapiens <\/em>arrived on the continent approximately 13,000 years ago by crossing the Bering Strait, which separates Asia from Alaska. The conclusions derived from the tests on the material collected in the semi-arid Northeast cave were published in an article in the Journal of Human Evolution <\/em>in December 2014. \u201cThere was no collagen that could be used to directly date the human bones from the cave using carbon 14,\u201d says archeologist Ni\u00e8de Guidon, another author of the paper and president of the Museum of the American Man Foundation (Fumdham). \u201cBut the results of the dating of the deer teeth and the concretion layer, obtained by three different laboratories, point to very ancient human occupation of the region.\u201d Fumdham manages the park in conjunction with the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation (ICMBio), a government agency within the Ministry of the Environment.<\/p>\n

\"037-039_Cien_Arqueologia_Eng_2015\"<\/a>Guidon and her collaborators have been conducting research in the vicinity of the park\u2014a UNESCO World Heritage site\u2014since the 1970s, particularly in the fields of archeology and paleontology. Her team has catalogued 1,400 prehistoric sites in the Capivara Mountains, which has the largest concentration in the Americas; 900 of these sites have rock paintings created thousands of years ago. In addition to human figures, the drawings on the rocks depict animals, including marsh deer (Blastocerus dichotomus<\/em>), which is the species whose teeth were found at Toca do Serrote das Moendas. Although there are numerous sites in the semi-arid state of Piau\u00ed, those sites have never provided human remains that could be carbon dated, which is the method that is generally employed to ascertain the age of organic matter (i.e., bones, shells, wood, coal, fabric) from as long ago as 50,000 years and in some cases even 100,000. Collagen, the organic portion of the bones that is indispensable to this dating technique, is a protein that is rarely preserved in the skeletons discovered in this region.<\/p>\n

Because it was impossible to determine the age of the bones discovered at what are potentially the oldest of the Capivara Mountains sites, Guidon has almost always endeavored to establish an acceptable timeline for the environment in which human bone fragments have been unearthed and for the artifacts and remains that may have been produced by human hands. Over the past three decades, she has dated the remains of stone hearths and artifacts attributed to H. sapiens<\/em>, along with ubiquitous rock paintings, a mark of human presence. Her results, which are still questioned by a significant portion of the scientific community, suggest a human presence in the region between 30,000 and 100,000 years ago; the hypothesis is that man arrived this early by way of an Atlantic sea route. The new study at Toca do Serrote das Moendas, a site located approximately five kilometers from the park, has afforded the archeologist additional data, based on other dating techniques, which can be applied to the controversial puzzle regarding when man first set foot in the Brazilian Northeast and, accordingly, in the Americas.<\/p>\n

\"Marsh

Jonathan Wilkins\/Wikimedia Commons<\/span>Marsh deer: animal depicted in the region\u2019s rock paintingsJonathan Wilkins\/Wikimedia Commons<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

This prehistoric site generates new potential for analysis. The sizeable cave, which measures 35 meters by 23 meters at its greatest width, has supplied the remains of paleofauna, stone artifacts, ceramic fragments, and portions of three human skeletons, two of children and one of an adult. The two teeth of the marsh deer lay side by side, 35 centimeters away from the fragments of the adult skeleton and located at the same depth. This scenario is an indication\u2014although not irrefutable proof\u2014that man and animal may have co-existed during the same era.<\/p>\n

Electron spin resonance (ESR)\u2014also known as electron paramagnetic resonance spectroscopy\u2014was used to date the teeth. The technique measures the amount of ionizing radiation incident on a sample using the spin concentration prompted by energy deposited in the material. \u201cIn principle, the older a tooth, the greater the dose deposited in it,\u201d says physicist Angela Kinoshita of Sacred Heart University (USC) in Bauru, S\u00e3o Paulo, and a post-doctoral researcher at the USP Department of Physics in Ribeir\u00e3o Preto, who examined one of the teeth using the technique. When dating a sample, in addition to recording the level of radiation stored in the tooth\u2019s enamel and dentine, scientists must consider the specific conditions at the site in which the material being analyzed was discovered (i.e., local levels of radiation emitted by elements such as uranium, thorium, and potassium) as well as cosmic radiation.<\/p>\n

A different technique was used to date the carbonate-rich concretion layer that practically sealed off the sediment stratum in which the teeth and human remains were found: optically stimulated luminescence (OSL). This method measures levels of this type of light in the quartz crystals of a geological layer. \u201cTheoretically, the more intense the OSL signal, the older the sample,\u201d explains Sonia Tatumi, the Unifesp physicist who analyzed two samples from the concretion layer at Toca do Serrote das Moendas. \u201cQuartz absorbs blue light and emits OSL in the ultraviolet region,\u201d she says. The data derived from a sample taken from the most central portion of the concretion were inconclusive. However, examination of a more external piece of the layer provided the results that appear in the scientific article: an age of 21,000 years, with a degree of accuracy of nearly 94%, according to Tatumi.<\/p>\n

Project<\/strong>
\nAdvances in electron spin resonance dosimetry, archeological dating and biomaterials characterization (n\u00ba 2007\/06720-4<\/a>); Grant mechanism<\/strong> Regular Grant; Principal investigator<\/strong> Oswaldo Baffa (USP\/Ribeir\u00e3o Preto); Investment<\/strong> R$507,101.73 (FAPESP).<\/p>\n

Scientific article<\/em>
\nKINOSHITA, A. et al<\/em>. Dating human occupation at Toca do Serrote das Moendas, S\u00e3o Raimundo Nonato, Piau\u00ed-Brazil by electron spin resonance and optically stimulated luminescence<\/a>. Journal of Human Evolution<\/strong>. V. 77, p. 187-95. Dec. 2014.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Teeth suggests that humans were present in Piau\u00ed over 20,000 years ago","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[159],"tags":[202,255],"coauthors":[101],"class_list":["post-204460","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science","tag-archaeology","tag-paleontology"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204460","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=204460"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204460\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=204460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=204460"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=204460"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=204460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}