Archaeologists have found 43 human skeletons and more than 100,000 artifacts at an excavation site in the coastal city of São Luís in northeastern Brazil. Scientists have long debated when and how people came to America and settled here from Asia. The archaeological site is much older than the oldest documented “pre-Sambaki” settlement ever found in the region, dating back 6,600 years. The findings suggest that humans settled this part of present-day Brazil at least 1,400 years earlier than previously thought.

However, the artifacts have been dated only by depth, and confirmatory isotope analysis has not yet been performed. Wellington Lage, the lead archaeologist on the excavation, said the find “could rewrite the history of human settlement in Brazil”. The archaeological site was discovered when a group of construction workers planning to build a new housing complex in a seaside town came across human bones and pottery shards.

Covered in tropical vegetation and surrounding the sprawling city of San Luis, capital of the state of Maranhão, the six-hectare (15-acre) area was known as Rosan Farm, after the daughter of a former local landowner.

Before construction began on the new apartment building, 70-year-old Wellington Lage’s company, W Lage Arqueologia, was hired by major Brazilian construction company MRV to survey the site. While investigating the area, Lage discovered that bones had been found in the 1970s and part of a human jaw had been found in 1991.

Lage and his team soon found much more: a stream of stone tools, ceramic shards, ornate shells and bones. According to Brazil’s National Institute of History and Art Heritage, 43 human skeletons and more than 100,000 artifacts were discovered during four years of excavations. [IPHAN]He described the discovery as “magnificent.”

Lage said his team of 27 people, including archaeologists, chemists, a historian and a documentary filmmaker, had “barely scratched the surface” even after four years of excavation. The research team plans to catalog each artifact before publishing their findings, and the items found will be on public display.

Four different settlement periods were identified in this region

The upper archaeological layer at the site contained numerous Tupinamba artifacts from one of several Tupi ethnic groups that inhabited what is now Brazil before its conquest by Portuguese colonial settlers in the early seventeenth century.

The team discovered Amazonian artifacts beneath the top layer, followed by a “sambaki mound” of discarded bones, shells and pottery. Underneath this mound, at a depth of about two meters (6.5 feet), pottery “aged between 8,000 and 9,000 years old” was found. This early date predates the oldest mound in the area, which Lage told AFP reporters “is 6,600 years old.”

“This could completely change the history of not only the region, but the whole of Brazil,” he told the AFP news agency.

Archaeologist Arkley Bandeira from the Federal University of Maranhao, who built a laboratory and museum to house the artifacts with MRV funding, said in his statement that this area can provide valuable new information about the culture and history of disappeared ancient peoples.