Native America

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Narrator

Archeologists Anna Roosevelt and Chris Davis are searching for the earliest evidence of people in the Americas. (bugs singing) In the Amazon rainforest of western Brazil, (people walking) their destination is a cave on this mountaintop rising out of the jungle. (people walking) This is the Caverna da Pedra Pintada. Portuguese for the Cave of the Painted Rock. That's amazing. There's art going from the base all the way up to the ceiling. -

Narrator

The cave is covered with paintings inspired by animals and the sky. In this case, there's a round object in the middle of the depiction of the turtle. -

Chris

Yeah, a lot of 'em are very abstract. The local people speculated that these were suns or moons. And that might match with the turtle because also turtle myths were related to the sun as well as a creation spirit. -

Narrator

This cave in the Amazon is rewriting the history of when and how people settled the Americas, and who those people are. (rattling) (flute music) For decades textbooks presented only one view. Around 11,000 B.C. during the ice age, big game hunters cross a frozen land bridge from Asia into Alaska, a region known as Beringia. (flute music) After the ice melts, they migrate down into the virgin territory of North and South America (low rumbling) hunting mammoths, giant sloths, and caribou with finely fashioned stone spear points. (bird calling) The standard view is that people reached the Amazon about a thousand years ago. But what Anna excavated in the Cave of the Painted Rock changes everything. The remains we found and dated in the cave show that people were living deep in the Amazon forest at 13,000 years ago. This is some of the earliest art in the world and it's definitely, so far, the earliest art in the hemisphere. (drums beating) -

Narrator

Thousands of years before the Romans or Greeks, 8,000 years before the Egyptians, at least 13,000 years ago people arrived in the Amazon. (people talking) And there's stone tools and paintings reveal these first Americans are not only mammoth hunters, they are foragers, fishermen, artists, and perhaps scientists. (drum beating)