....................

Today over 300 archeological sites have been discovered (most with rock art), captivating the interest of no less than 35 specialists in the fields of archaeology, geology, ecology, as well as other related disciplines. Säo Raimundo Nonato is described as lying "in one of the most beautiful and wild regions of South America." (Guidon, 1987) The natives call the region caat-inga, or "White Forest".

The region is littered with charcoal-containing hearths. "Charcoal samples from the hearths yielded a consistently ordered series of twelve carbon 14 dates that ranged from 32,000 to 17,000 years ago." (Ibid.) The most ancient dates were obtained from red marks found on chunks that fell from the rock walls, becoming embedded within layers dating from 32,000 to 27,000 years old. At another nearby cave, Toca do Sitio do Meio, artifacts dated from 15,000 to 12,000 years B.P. These discoveries alone illustrate that humans had been occuping South America at least as long as 32,000 years.

In 1991 Prof. Baffa from the Physics Department of the University of Säo Paulo at Ribeirao Preto, dated a layer of calcite that was covering two red anthropomorphic figures at the site of Toca da Bastiana. The calcite dated to 17,000 years old. (Guidon & Delibrias, 1986)

Even more recently Prof. Guidon noted that calcite was formed on rockwall paintings at least 36,000 years old. Such a figure reinforces the results obtained by archaeologists at Serra da Capivara (e.g. Pedra Furada.) using the C-14 method. (Guidon, La Salva, et al., 2003) This serves to push activities of human beings in Brazil back to at least 36,000 years ago.

Over 300 sites have been found within the park, the majority consisting of rock and wall paintings (like the one on the right) dating from 30,000-50,000 years B.P.

The fact that prehistoric human activity seems to have taken place earlier in South America than in North America places the Bering Strait Only hypothesis in grave doubt. During an interview Guidon bravely supported the theory that certain prehistoric Europeans may have crossed the Atlantic Ocean to populate America—an idea which is gaining evidential support almost daily. (Bellos, 2000)

Archeologists are slowly beginning to realize that to understand American prehistory, European prehistory must also be considered. The Solutreans of Spain, and possibly the Magdalenians, are now believed to have crossed the Atlantic using the southern Equatorial current and to have entered the Caribbean arena 18,000-12,000 years ago. From there they continued onto the American continents, eventually spreading both north and south.

Dr. Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington, states: "We now know that human beings learned to sail 50,000 years before the present. Mankind settled in Australia then and it was not linked by any land bridge to Asia. It could only have been reached by boat. Clearly, we had mastered sailing tens of thousands of years before America was colonized, so we should not be surprised by the idea that people took boat trips across the Atlantic 18,000 years ago" (Stanford & Bradley, 2004)