Archaeologists Unearth Lost Camps of Chile’s Elephant Hunters

Temporary campsites indicate repeated visits by early hunter-gatherers.
Thousands of years ago, early hunter-gatherers frequently visited Tagua Tagua Lake in Chile to hunt prehistoric elephants and utilize the area’s resources, according to a study recently published in the journal PLOS ONE by Rafael Labarca and colleagues from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile.

Multiple archaeological sites are known from the region of Tagua Tagua Lake in central Chile, representing some of the earliest known human settlements in the Americas. In this study, Labarca and colleagues report the recent discovery of a new site called Taguatagua 3, an ancient hunter-gatherer camp dating to the Late Pleistocene, between 12,440 and 12,550 years old.