Nearly 5000 years ago, hunters paddling flimsy boats across a warm, shallow Brazilian bay approached the ultimate quarry: a whale at rest. With months of food for their communities hanging in the balance, they struck their prey with harpoons carved from the bones of whales killed on previous forays.
These harpoons, researchers argue in a study published today in Nature Communications, were used around 2900 B.C.E. If the team’s interpretation is correct, the artifacts may represent the earliest evidence of whale hunting in the world. The hunt in the warm waters of the southern Atlantic Ocean took place far from the icy seas of the far north usually associated with early whaling. “They have what could be evidence of active whaling very early—earlier than it’s ever been demonstrated in the Northern Hemisphere,” says Gregory Monks, an emeritus professor of archaeology at the University of Manitoba who was not involved with the new research.
Archaeologists had previously found whale bones in early South American sites, but they had assumed the remains came from opportunistically exploiting beached whales or washed-up carcasses. “The consensus was the people living along the Brazilian coast were just collecting animals that were stranded, because no one had ever found large harpoons before,” says André Carlo Colonese, an archaeologist at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) who co-authored the new study.
Evidence to the contrary emerged from Brazilian shell mounds known as sambaquis. Built up from fish remains, discarded mussel and oyster shells, and other human refuse, the mounds can rise 10 meters or more above the surrounding landscape. Hundreds of sambaquis once dotted the landscape around Babitonga Bay, a coastal wetland area several hundred kilometers south of São Paulo.
As Brazil developed its road network in the 1940s and ’50s, builders used Babitonga Bay’s sambaquis as a source of lime for concrete. As the mounds were dismantled, an amateur archaeologist in the area rescued odd-shaped bones and artifacts by the boxful, eventually donating more than 9000 objects to a local museum.
The material sat in storage for decades until Colonese and UAB molecular archaeologist Krista McGrath began working with Tatiane Andaluzia, an archaeologist at the nearby Federal University of Paraná, to identify evidence for prehistoric fishing on the Brazilian coast. “The curators went in back and brought out dusty boxes with whale bone artifacts inside,” Colonese recalls.
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Several thick, straight pieces of bone as long as a forearm and carved into points caught Colonese’s eye. “The moment they took them out, I said, ‘Guys, these are harpoons,’” Colonese says.
The long bone shafts resembled tools found at more recent South American sites that were used to hunt whales from small boats. Bound together into a hook shape with twine, the bone shafts were probably carved to fit into sockets on a long pole. Attached to an air-filled bladder, the harpoon would make it impossible for a whale to dive, eventually forcing it to the surface where it could be killed. “We started to think maybe these people were hunting whales after all,” Colonese says. “It seems extraordinary, but people do incredible things.”
Further evidence came from the bones themselves. To see which species the harpoons were made from, McGrath used a nondestructive method to extract proteins from the specimens, rubbing them inside a plastic bag or with a sandpaperlike film and then analyzing the residue left behind. Proteins from the harpoon shafts and other bone fragments not only identified them as whale bone, but also allowed the researchers to identify specific whale species.
Most of the bones were from southern right whales, a slow-moving species known to breed and raise their young close to shore in the Southern Hemisphere’s winter months. “The southern right whale is very coastal, they’re slow swimmers, and they float after they’re struck by harpoons and die. That makes it easy for these hunters to drag them to shore,” says Youri van den Hurk, an archaeologist at the University of Bergen who was not part of the study.
Paddling after and attacking a whale capable of crushing a dugout canoe with a stroke of its tail would have been hugely dangerous. But a successful hunt would have provided a windfall of food and conveyed tremendous prestige on the hunters, possibly in both life and death. Records in the museum’s archives showed that within some sambaquis—which doubled as burial grounds—harpoons and other artifacts carved from whale bones were often found next to skeletons. “It’s a huge undertaking, and if you actually catch one, you’d have so much meat you can distribute it among many communities,” van den Hurk says. “It would be reason for great celebration for a whole region.”
Together with the harpoons, the evidence suggests that instead of randomly washing ashore, the whale remains in Babitonga Bay’s shell mounds are likely the product of active whale hunting almost 5000 years ago. “We have the right tools and the right species,” McGrath says. “And I’m sure they had watercraft and the ability to get out into the water to hunt.”
Monks agrees the new finds provide strong circumstantial evidence for hunting—but without direct evidence of a harpoon strike on a whale bone, he says the case can’t quite be closed. “The evidence is very suggestive, and they’re probably right,” he says. “But none of the bones had any puncture wounds or damage from harpoon thrusts. Where’s the smoking harpoon?”
