Original Settlers

Archaeologists have dated the human pres?ence in the Rio de Janeiro area and the Serra da Capivara in northeast Brazil to about 50,000 years ago, among the earliest dates in the whole American continent. It's generally believed that the pre-Hispanic in?habitants of the Americas arrived from Siberia in waves of migration between about 60,000 and 8000 BC, crossing land now submerged beneath the Bering Strait, then making their way gradually southward.

Brazil's size, climate and impenetrable jungles have all hampered archaeologists' efforts to unravel its prehistory. Brazilian Indians never developed a highly advanced, centralized civilization like the Inca or Maya. They left little for archaeologists to discover; chiefly pottery, trash mounds and some skeletons.

Rock paintings attest to the presence of hunter-gatherers near Monte Alegre, about 700km upstream from the mouth of the Amazon, about 12,000 years ago. Settled societies with thousands of members, cultivating maize and manioc and producing wellmade pottery, probably emerged a few centuries BC on the Ilha de Maraj? at the river's mouth and in other areas around the lower Amazon. Farther south, at Lagoa Santa in Minas Gerais, the ancient bones of a human being have been linked with a mammoth slaughtered for food as early as 10,000 BC.

The most aesthetically exciting objects excavated in Brazil, elaborate burial urns of the Marajoara culture of about 400-1350 AD, were found on the Ilha de Maraj?.

Estimates of the number of people living in what's now Brazil when the Portuguese arrived 1500 range from about 2 million to 6 million. The population was probably composed of more than 1000 tribes, ranging from nomadic hunter-gatherers to more settled, agricultural societies. Many probably lived in long communal huts and every couple of years would pack up the village and move to new hunting grounds. Women did most of the 'domestic' work, while the men, who were magnificent archers and fishermen, hunted and went to war. Music, dance and games played a very important role in the culture. Little surplus was produced and they had very few possessions.

This lifestyle, which came to symbolize the ideal of the noble savage in European minds and inspired social thinkers such as Rousseau and Defoe, was punctuated by frequent tribal warfare and ritual cannibalism. In many tribes, captured enemies were ceremonially killed and eaten after battle.

The peoples along the coast at the time of the Portuguese arrival fall into three main groups: the Guarani, the Tupi and the Tapuia. The Guarani occupied the coast south of Sao Paulo and the Paraguai and Parana basins inland. The Tupi (also called Tupinamba) occupied most of the rest of the coast. Categorized together because of their similarities of language and culture, these two groups are known as the Tupi?Guarani. A European adaptation of the Tupi-Guarani language spread throughout colonial Brazil and is still spoken by some people in Amazonia. Tapuia was the name given by the Tupi and Guarani to all the different peoples who inhabited shorter stretches of coast in among the Tupi and Guarani.