The earliest evidence of whaling in Brazil shows that indigenous people hunted whales 5,000 years ago.
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Whaling began much earlier – and much further south – than scientists previously suspected.
Five-thousand-year-old whale fan harpoons and other artifacts along Brazil’s southern coast suggest that indigenous communities actively hunted whales at least 1,500 years before the first evidence to datethe researchers report on January 9 in Natural communications. The findings not only rewrite the origins of whaling, but also suggest that humpback whales once lived outside their modern range, meaning that animals now settling in the region could reclaim ancient habitat.
Until now, scientists believed that organized whaling originated between 3,500 and 2,500 years ago in the Arctic and North Pacific, due to food scarcity in the extreme environments of the North. Although whale bones have been discovered at archaeological sites in South America, they were generally attributed to opportunistic recoveries of stranded animals. The new evidence suggests active hunting: specialized bone harpoons, whale bone crafts, and bones bearing cut marks from systematic butchery.
The artifacts came from large shell middens known as sambaquiswhich are abundant along the southern coast of Brazil. To save them from urban development in the mid-20th century, an amateur archaeologist collected more than 10,000 objects from sambaquis in the Babitonga Bay region. The collection is now kept at the Sambaqui Archaeological Museum in Joinville. These mounds could reach 30 meters in height and served not only as landfills but also as burial sites, the deceased often being accompanied by handicrafts made from whale bone.
When archaeologist Andre Colonese and his colleagues recently re-examined the collection, the scale of the whale remains was remarkable. “There is an absurd amount of whale bones in these mounds,” says Colonese, of the Autonomous University of Barcelona. A series of long, identical sticks with pointed ends stood out. “They’re harpoon heads,” he realized.
Laboratory analyzes confirmed the age of 5,000 years of the harpoons. Protein analysis of hundreds of whale bone objects showed that most came from southern right whales (Eubalaena australis), but some came from humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) and several species of dolphins. Humpback whales were a surprise because they had long been absent from Brazil’s southern coast, says Krista McGrath, a biomolecular archaeologist also at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.
This discovery offers a unique insight into the ecology of the region before European colonization. Humpback whales were likely eliminated from these waters by intensive whaling in the 17th and 18th centuries, Colonese says. Their recent and temporary return to the region could therefore represent a recolonization of the historic habitat rather than a change driven by modern population growth.
This distinction is important. This can help conservation efforts by showing that the natural range of humpback whales includes areas as far south as Babitonga Bay, even though their current breeding grounds are hundreds of kilometers to the north, the researchers say.
Similar protein studies have been common in Europe and the American northwest over the past decade, but “very few studies have actually been undertaken in the southern hemisphere,” says Youri van der Hurk, a zooarchaeologist at the University of Bergen in Norway, who was not involved in the study. “It doesn’t surprise me at all that humans exploited whales all over the world while they were close to their colonies.”
Certain species of whales would have been particularly vulnerable. Southern right whales frequently linger near the coast with their calves and stay afloat when they die, making it easier for hunters to recover the animals, the authors say.
Researchers have often resisted the idea of early whaling in resource-rich places like Brazil, McGrath says: “Why would you risk doing that?” But a single whale could produce such an abundance of food and other valuable materials such as blubber, oil and bones, which were transformed into toolsshe says, that the question answers itself: “You catch a whale and you’re good for months.”
The team plans to study other areas along the Brazilian coast and suspects that similar evidence of whaling across the Americas will emerge now that scientists know what to look for. They are also building a catalog of whale species present before Europeans arrived, hoping to inform conservation efforts. “Then we can say to conservationists and biologists and politicians, ‘Look, these are the species that were here,’” Colonese says.