AMAZON CAVE OFFERS CLUES ABOUT FIRST AMERICANS.Byline: John Noble Wilford The New York New York, state, United States New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of Times Digging in a cave near the Amazon River Amazon River Portuguese Rio Amazonas River, northern South America. It is the largest river in the world in volume and area of drainage basin; only the Nile River of eastern and northeastern Africa exceeds it in length. in Brazil, archeologists have found stone weapons, rock paintings, and other traces of what may have been one of the earliest human cultures in the Americas. The discovery could revise thinking - and stir more controversy - about the lives and migrations of the first Americans. The excavations yielded evidence that the ancient Americans who regularly camped in the cave led lives distinct from the big-game hunters who roamed the plains and hills of western North America North America, third largest continent (1990 est. pop. 365,000,000), c.9,400,000 sq mi (24,346,000 sq km), the northern of the two continents of the Western Hemisphere. at the same time, about 11,000 years ago. These Amazonian people lived off the fruits and nuts and small game of the tropical forest and took fish and turtles from the river. Their paintings on the cave walls are thought to be the earliest reliably dated examples of art yet found in the Americas. The earliest European cave paintings are believed to be more than 30,000 years old. The findings, being reported today in the journal Science, challenge the widely held assumption, based on knowledge of an ancient group of North Americans called the Clovis people, that the earliest Americans were primarily specialized big-game hunters who lived in open, temperate country and could not have sustained a culture in the humid tropics tropics, also called tropical zone or torrid zone, all the land and water of the earth situated between the Tropic of Cancer at lat. 23 1-2°N and the Tropic of Capricorn at lat. 23 1-2°S. , where large animals were scarce. They had supposedly migrated across the Bering Straits from Asia in pursuit of mammoths and mastodons, settled in North America, and then moved into South America South America, fourth largest continent (1991 est. pop. 299,150,000), c.6,880,000 sq mi (17,819,000 sq km), the southern of the two continents of the Western Hemisphere. , still a hunting society and living mainly in the highlands. These hunters were presumed to be the forerunners of all subsequent cultures in South America. But a team of archeologists, led by Dr. Anna C. Roosevelt, of the Field Museum in Chicago and the University of Illinois University of Illinois may refer to:
n. A radioactive isotope of carbon, especially carbon 14. radiocarbon Noun a radioactive isotope of carbon, esp. dates of material in the Brazilian cave which indicated that early paleo-Indians there were contemporaries of the Clovis people with a distinctive foraging economy and different styles of stone weapons. These foragers used the cave as a campsite from 11,200 to 10,000 years ago, the scientists estimated. The research seemed to confirm earlier evidence that the spread of paleo-Indians through the Americas was more complex than current theories would explain. It also seemed to lend weight to Dr. Roosevelt's thesis, based on two decades of excavations in Amazonia, that the tropical lowlands were not necessarily a barrier to early human cultures and that, indeed, substantial societies were living in Amazonia as early as or earlier than in the Andes. CAPTION(S): Map Map: Cave site (Monte Alegre There are several places that have the name Monte Alegre in Brazil:
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