Whale hunting began 5,000 years ago in South America, a millennium earlier than previously thought

The hunting of large whales goes back much further in time than previously thought. New research from the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB) and the Department of Prehistory of the UAB reveals that Indigenous communities in southern Brazil were hunting large cetaceans 5,000 years ago, around a thousand years before the earliest documented evidence from Arctic and North Pacific societies.

Published in Nature Communications, the study shows that groups in the region of Babitonga Bay (Santa Catarina) who built sambaquis – monumental shell mounds built by Holocene societies along the coast of Brazil – developed specialized technologies for hunting large whales long before earlier archaeological research had suggested. The study redefines the role of South American communities in the emergence of complex maritime culture as, until now, the origins of large-whale hunting were believed to lie among postglacial societies of the Northern Hemisphere between 3,500 and 2,500 years ago.

Led by ICTA-UAB researchers Krista McGrath and André Colonese and conducted with an international team, the study analysed hundreds of cetacean bone remains and bone tools from sambaquis in Babitonga Bay, now housed at the Museu Arqueológico de Sambaqui de Joinville, Brazil. Many of the sites no longer exist, making this collection a unique archive of a history that otherwise could not have been reconstructed.

The team combined zooarchaeology, typological analysis, and cutting-edge molecular techniques (ZooMS) to study the cetacean bones and objects, identifying remains of the southern right whales, humpback whales, blue whales, sei whales, sperm whales, and dolphins, many showing clear cut marks associated with butchering. Large whale-bone harpoons were also documented among the largest found in South America. Their presence, alongside the abundance of whale bones, their inclusion in funerary contexts and the presence of inshore species, provides strong evidence of active hunting rather than opportunistic use of stranded animals.

“The data reveals that these communities had the knowledge, tools, and specialized strategies to hunt large whales thousands of years earlier than we had previously assumed,” says Krista McGrath, lead author of the study.

The results also offer important ecological insights. The abundance of humpback whale remains suggest that their historical distribution extended much further south than the current main breeding areas off the coast of Brazil. “The recent increase in sightings in Southern Brazil may therefore reflect a historical recolonization process, with implications for conservation. Reconstructing whale distributions before the impact of industrial whaling is essential to understanding their recovery dynamics,” says Marta Cremer, co-author of the paper.

Beyond rewriting the origins of early whale hunting, the study sheds new light on the economies, technologies, and lifeways of postglacial societies along the Atlantic coast of South America. According to André Colonese, senior author of the study, “This research opens a new perspective on the social organization of the Sambaqui peoples. It represents a paradigm shift - we can now view these groups not only as shellfish collectors and fishers, but also as whalers.”

Dione Bandeira, a Brazilian archaeologist with more than 20 years of experience working on sambaquis, adds that “the results reveal a practice that made a significant contribution to the long-term and dense presence of these societies along the Brazilian coast.”

The Sambaqui peoples integrated marine resources into their cultural systems and developed a sophisticated maritime culture characterized by specialized technologies, collective cooperation, and ritual practices associated with the capture of large marine animals. This unwritten Indigenous history has survived through museum collections and through the efforts of those working to preserve the sambaqui sites that have escaped the impact of Brazil’s urbanization over the past centuries.

Ana Paula, director of the Museu Arqueológico de Sambaqui de Joinville, notes that “the collections safeguarded at the Sambaqui Archaeological Museum in Joinville, especially the Guilherme Tibúrtius Collection, highlight the richness and vast potential of information on ancestral peoples that can still be explored in depth.”