2023 AUG 20 (VerticalNews) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at VerticalNews Health & Science -- An article to be published on July 31 in Nature Ecology & Evolution reveals that Luzio, the oldest human skeleton found in Sao Paulo state (Brazil), was a descendant of the ancestral population that settled the Americas at least 16,000 years ago and gave rise to all present-day Indigenous peoples, such as the Tupi.
Based on the largest set of Brazilian archeological genomic data, the study reported in the article also offers an explanation for the disappearance of the oldest coastal communities, who built the icons of Brazilian archeology known as sambaquis, huge mounds of shells and fishbones used as dwellings, cemeteries and territorial boundaries. Archeologists often refer to these monuments as shell mounds or kitchen middens.
"After the Andean civilizations, the Atlantic coast sambaqui builders were the human phenomenon with the highest demographic density in pre-colonial South America. They were the 'kings of the coast' for thousands and thousands of years. They vanished suddenly about 2,000 years ago," said Andre Menezes Strauss, an archeologist at the University of Sao Paulo's Museum...