Readers’ wildlife photos

Athayde Tonhasca Júnior is here to present the first part of a three-part text-and-photo series on Brazil. Athayde’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Back in the day. Way, way back

The Brazilian north-eastern hinterland is not a hospitable place for an outsider. Except for a short and intense rainy season, this is a dry, dusty and sizzling territory: a land of the cactus, thorny scrub and stunted trees. The native Tupi speakers called this semiarid region caa (forest, vegetation) tinga (white), and the term was adopted by the Portuguese settlers as caatinga. But the apparent harshness of the landscape misrepresents its ecological importance. The caatinga is a biota found nowhere else in the world, harbouring more than 2,000 species of vascular plants and vertebrates, with endemism in these groups ranging from 7 to 60%. And like every other Brazilian ecoregion, the caatinga has been severely degraded and fragmented. But its plants and animals have one place of refuge: the Serra da Capivara National Park in the state of Piauí. The park is a haven to numerous birds and endangered mammals such as the giant anteater (Myrmecophaga tridactyla), three-banded armadillo (Tolypeutes tricinctus), jaguar (Panthera onca) and other cats, and the maned wolf (Chrysocyon brachyurus).

The 129,140-ha park contains a massif of sandstone sediments formed some 430 million years ago when the whole area was submerged under a sea. The massif, smoothed by water and wind, was once the seabed, and pebble conglomerates on top indicate an overlying beach.

A view of Serra da Capivara National Park, a geologist’s delight:

The park is surrounded by a 10-kilometer buffer zone that is also protected. In this private property contiguous with the park, the rocky walls echo the racket of howler monkeys (Alouatta spp.):

At the base of the sandstone massif, there are hundreds of hidden shelters and overhangs, where ancient peoples expressed themselves through rock art. Thousands of prehistoric paintings sprawl on rock walls and ceilings depicting armadillos, rheas, jaguars, lizards, capybaras (the only capybaras in the Capybara National Park are painted on walls), as well as human figures hunting, playing, dancing, having sex, and being nasty to each other. The images were mostly painted with red ochre (haematite) and other clays; some were made with burned bone charcoal. Because there are no organic components in the pigments used in the paintings, it is not possible to date them precisely. The lower estimates are around 5,000 years.

A rhea painted under this shelter:

Among animals and people, a woman gives birth (highlighted by the arrow):

“The kiss”, one of the most famous paintings in the collection. But in truth we have no idea whether the image indeed depicts two people kissing:

A poor soul saying goodbye to this world in the maw of a jaguar or puma – identified by its paws:

The creation of the park and its protection came about thanks to the efforts of archaeologist Niède Guidon, who also managed to kick off a major kerfuffle in the archaeological world. Based on her excavations carried out between 1978 and 1987, Guidon concluded that the Capivara paintings could be over 12,000 years old. And more: she found evidence of hearth fires and stone tools in layers ranging from 5,000 to 60,000 years, the oldest dates for human habitation in the Americas (Guidon & Delibrias, 1986). Guidon’s conclusions started an ongoing debate because they challenged the established Clovis First theory, which argues that people colonised North America via the Bering Straits ~13,000 years ago, then moved down into Central and South America in the following millennia. Her critics, mostly American archaeologists, claimed the tools she found were made by monkeys or are natural objects altered by weather, and that her carbon hearth samples were the result of natural fires. Guidon, who’s backed by French archaeologists, retorted that ‘Americans should excavate more and write less’. Ouch.

Because of its biodiversity, outstanding geology, pre-historical paintings and more than 1,300 archaeological sites, the park became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1991:

Guidon may have been vindicated because subsequent excavations in Argentina, Brazil, Chile and USA have also raised doubts about the Clovis First theory. It seems possible now that humans came to the Americas in a series of colonising waves through the Bering Straits starting way before 13,000 years (Waters & Stafford, 2007). But Guidon’s conjecture that Homo sapiens first arrived in South America crossing the Atlantic from Africa, perhaps as far back as 100,000 BC, has received scant support. For one thing, genetic analyses contradict her.

A soup kitchen queue? A religious ceremony? A conga line?:

During the short and unpredictable rainy season, a roaring waterfall runs through this natural gutter:

Hell to the left:

Hell doesn’t look too bad:

A view of the caatinga, with the Museu do Homem Americano (Museum of the American Man) in the distance. All ‘dead’ vegetation will burst into green life at the first downpour: