Ancient People in Brazil Were Hunting Massive Whales 5,000 Years Ago, Well Before Arctic Civilizations

When we imagine the earliest humans brave enough to hunt a forty-ton whale, the image that usually comes to mind is frosty and monochromatic. We tend to think of the Arctic: people wrapped in furs, navigating icy waters to harpoon bowhead whales. This mental picture has been the dominating view in archaeology, suggesting that systematic whaling was a technology born of necessity in the cold, harsh environments of the Northern Hemisphere about 3,500 years ago. But a surprising new study has upended that timeline - and shifted the geography entirely. It turns out that 5,000 years ago, in the warm, subtropical waters of southern Brazil, Indigenous communities were already masters of the whale hunt. Published in Nature Communications, this research pushes back the origins of whaling by more than a millennium. It reveals a sophisticated maritime culture that saw whales not just as occasional stranded gifts from the tide, but as prey to be actively pursued, processed, and even honored. The Shell Mound Builders The people at the center of this discovery are known as the Sambaqui. For nearly 7,000 years, these groups lived along the estuaries and lagoons of the Brazilian coast. They are most famous for building massive shell mounds - some standing as monumental landmarks - which served as living spaces, cemeteries, and territorial markers. Large and outstanding sambaquis in the open coastal landscape from the Santa Marta/Camacho area, Santa Catarina, southern Brazil. Above, Figueirinha and Cigana; below, the twin-mounds Encantada I and II and Santa Marta I. Credit: Sambaquis and Paisagem Project, MAE-USP. For a long time, archaeologists viewed the Sambaqui primarily as shellfish gatherers and fishers. We knew they used marine resources, but the idea that they were taking down leviathans like the southern right whale (which can reach 17 meters in length) was controversial, to say the least. The prevailing view was that if you found a whale bone in a shell mound, it was likely scavenged from a beached carcass. “The absence of specialised harpoon technology, as well as the lack of hunting marks, has led to a general perception that whales were not intensively exploited, but rather used opportunistically when stranded,” the study authors explain. But the evidence was there all along, hiding in plain sight inside a museum collection. × Get smarter every day... Stay ahead with ZME Science and subscribe. Thank you! One more thing... Please check your inbox and confirm your subscription. Decoding the “Bastões” Harpoons foreshaft found in a human burial in from Morro do Ouro. Credit: ERC-TRADITION. The breakthrough didn’t come from a new excavation, but from a fresh look at old bones. Researchers from the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA-UAB) and other institutions dove into the collection of Guilherme Tiburtius, an amateur archaeologist who gathered artifacts between the 1940s and 1960s. Tiburtius had collected curious, highly polished bone rods from sites around Babitonga Bay in Santa Catarina. In his notebooks, he referred to them generically as bastões (Portuguese for sticks). When the research team...

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