ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, April 19, 1996 TAG: 9604190052
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: B6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DALLAS MORNING NEWS
Some of the Americas' earliest inhabitants had reached a cave in the Brazilian Amazon just a few hundred years after reaching the New World, archaeologists report in an article published today.
The discovery of people living in the Amazon slightly more than 11,000 years ago provides further evidence that the first Americans were not exclusively bison and mammoth hunters who roamed the plains of western North America.
``It's exciting,'' said Brian Fagan, an archaeologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. ``It gets us away from the big-game stereotype.''
Reporting in the journal Science, archaeologists from Brazil, France and the United States describe people who lived much as indigenous Amazonians do today. The people of Caverna da Pedra Pintada, or ``painted-rock cave,'' ate fish, small game, tropical fruits and nuts. They made stone arrow points and other tools, and painted humans, animals and abstract designs on the walls of their home.
The paintings that give the cave its name may be the oldest American cave art known, the archaeologists noted.
In the past, studies of America's first occupants have focused on the Clovis people, named after a town in eastern New Mexico where their remains were first described. The Clovis people lived on the high plains of North America between 11,500 and 8,000 years ago, where they hunted mammoth and bison. They were thought to have followed herds of animals across a land bridge that connected Alaska to Siberia nearly 12,000 years ago, and to have spent the next few thousand years hunting in western and central North America.
But recent archaeological discoveries - including the one described Friday - suggest the Clovis people were not as alone in the Americas as scholars once thought.
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