Interactions Between Pre-Historic Humans and Quaternary Megafauna in South America: Zooarcheological and Paleoecological Aspects

Human groups spread out over the Asia toward the eastern Siberia until to reach the Americas crossing the Bering Strait. From then on, humans began to coexist with the American Quaternary Megafauna. All researches performed involving human-megafauna interactions so far are parochial and have only revealed punctual occurrences. Compilations and discussions of the incidence of interactions between pre-historic humans and Quaternary megamammals have not been conducted for South America. This paper presents a compilation of paleontological-archeological sites with evidence of pre-historic human-megafauna interaction in South America and discusses their general characteristics in order to generate an overview of these cases and develop a mapping of already acquired information. In addition, we standardize the types of marks found in the previously studied materials, but which did not present a formal description using zooarchaeological terminologies. Human-megafauna interactions are reported in Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela and Uruguay. In South America, species of giant sloths and mastodons seem to have been preferred by humans. Four major types of anthropogenic modifications are observed (sawing and slicing, scraping, chopping and dynamic percussion), however, there is no predominance of a specific type of alteration. These marks are well distributed geographically, as well as in relation to mammalian taxa. Thus, it is not possible to determine a pattern between the types of anthropogenic modifications, geographic location, and taxa. This may indicate that the type of butchering and the damages are independent attributes, and it is likely that different motions would be used for different purposes, depending on the species. The scarcity of butchering cases suggests that megafauna hunting was an opportunistic event, a hypothesis that contrasts with the idea of overkill. The dates obtained are not consistent with the classical model of human arrival in South America – which would have occurred by a single migratory pulse across the Bering Strait –, but corroborate the hypothesis of more complex migration pathways. They also corroborate the hypothesis that the human being cohabited with the Quaternary megafauna for millennia prior to the Late Pleistocene-early Holocene megafaunal extinction.