Megafauna-human interaction in central Mexico 35,000 years ago? Late Pleistocene bones and artifacts from Cedral, San Luis Potosí
Prehistory and World Archaeology
Final Report Abstract
The positive outcome of the project is three partite: 1.) According to Lorenzo and Mirambell (1986), the age of the proboscidean femoral head modified by humans would have a minimum age of 21,000 years and represents one out of six traces for such an interaction. However, this age could not be confirmed due to a lack of collagen. According to Carlos Brinn, the finder of the specimen, the femoral head comes from the bottom-most layer of the Amapola excavation site and was collected after the end of the UASLP excavations. 2.) The young material from the Peña Cave (unit 1) represents an ecological archive containing an unusual wealth of taxa that inhabited the area during about the past 500 years. Isotope investigation could reveal climate proxies for this time range. 3.) The mudstone fossil assemblage from La Peña Cave (unit 3) ranges from 26,000-29,000 BC, at least, and thus clearly dates to Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) and pre-LGM times. This unit provides some first evidence of animal-human interaction for that range of time. In the future, the abundance of bones from this yet undocumented site in the Real de Catorce mountains may not only add important information to the paleobiodiversity of the region. The assemblage may also help to solve questions that are still unanswered due to missing or misinterpreted data resulting from the Amapola project in the eighties and later. Furthermore, the La Peña Cave is only about 50 km distance to the “Cueva del Chiquihuite” in Zacatecas where lithic tools of unknown technological tradition have recently been documented by Ardelean et al. (2020) along with animal bone fragments, plant remains, and environmental DNA contained in sediment. These findings have been dated to between 18,000 and 27,000 years BP, and thus also to LGM and pre-LGM times. It thus appears that human groups may have existed in Mexico before the Clovis, long considered the first inhabitants of America as early as 13,500 years. San Luis Potosí and Zacatecas in central Mexico may hold evidence to show that human history in the Americas begun significantly earlier than presently accepted.
