Peru is rich with pre-Colombian history.
While many are familiar with the Incas, few have heard of the Chachapoa high in the Andian rainforest, the people known as the cloud warriors were absorbed into the Inca Empire.
The incorporation of the Chacha territory was a bloody process.
>> Without written records, scientists must study their grave sites and their mummies for clues about the people themselves.
>> This is the big gap that we have in pre- European history in the continent.
When you see a mummy, you see the best connection you can make to a person that was living a thousand, 5,000, or 10,000 years ago.
>> Now, archaeologists and geneticists are uncovering surprising details about one of the most mysterious civilizations in the Americas.
Who were the Chachapoa people and why did they vanish between the steep gorges of the Peruvian Andes and the rainforests of Amazonus.
Scientists search for clues about an enigmatic people called the Chachapoa.
The cloud forest where they lived is often called the Seaha de Selva or eyebrow of the jungle.
It’s also where they buried their dead.
High on the cliffs of Karahia overlooking the Utkoba Valley are six figures placed there over 500 years ago.
They are puru manchu the cloud people’s most impressive sarcophagi and each contains human remains.
>> You still have the original almost intact sarcophagy that are still incustoonated in in the slope of the mountain because these ones are so unaccessible.
They remained there sort of dominating the valley.
The Puru Manchu stood guard to ward off evil and to gaze upon their living relatives in the valley below.
>> So they would have placed them in the slope of the mountain and they would have destroyed the path to reach their position so that now you cannot go there anymore.
>> They were installed nearly 9,000 ft up a vertical rock face.
Sometimes painted with red, white, yellow, and black pigments.
A seventh sarcophagus toppled off the cliff during an earthquake in 1928.
Built from a mix of clay, straw, and mud mortar that was spread over cane stalks.
Each protects bones and other relics.
The dead were found in fetal positions wrapped in cotton blankets and facing forward.
Many other Chachapoa grave sites and cemeteries are hidden within the caves in the region.
Every crevice, every small al cove or cave in this area has uh human remains.
Bioarchchaeologist Dr. Sonia Gillian is the world expert on the Chachapoa culture.
She’s the director and founder of a nonprofit center in Limma Bomba built to house the ancient remains that her team has recovered outside Karahia and throughout the Chachapoa landscape.
>> We try to remove as many of the mummies remains, skeletons, isolated bones that had been placed and had been left.
>> Now in the Central Mi Museum, they sit together like a lost tribe.
eternally silent but speaking volumes to the archaeologists who study them.
>> We are showing evidence of our history.
We are showing evidence of how people lived and who they were.
But the emotional part, the connecting part is very personal.
Otherwise, I would say it’s better for these remains to be left untouched.
The chachaoya were skilled imbalmer.
The soft tissue uh is removed through the decay process through animals through time and eventually they put together the bones, the nails, uh the hair and wrap it up and put it into a package and they put it in a special cemetery area in special burial site.
The final stages of the mummification process were left to the cold dry climate which helped to preserve the remains.
The way they prepared the disease, the way where they placed them, the way they wrapped them, the way they were presented with uh elements of their daily life and offerings uh indicates that they had a connection to their ancestors and they were visited.
They were treated.
They were not only remembered, but they were maintained in their daily life as ancestors.
>> Radiocarbon dating places the mummy bundles in the late 15th century, shortly before the Spanish conquered the Incas.
Before that, the Incas did their best to conquer the cloud warriors.
The Chacha rebelled for many years, but the Incas eventually overpowered them.
Many were forced to resettle in other parts of the vast Incan territory.
When the Spanish arrived in 1532 on their quest to subdue the mighty Incan Empire, some Chachapoa joined them to exact revenge on the bloodthirsty Inca.
They were really interested in an association with people that would help them defeat the Inca.
The Spanish concungistadors created the first written records of the Chachapoa.
That’s why except for the mummies, much of what we know about the people comes from their buildings which were unlike those of the Ankas.
There’s a characteristic of the very classic uh stone masonry and and the chachapoa is quite different in the way they finish the stone and the stone they worked with and how they decided they would decorate their their buildings and what their buildings were for.
60 mi from Kuraya is a mountain citadel that archaeologists call Quaap.
Quaap is the Chachaoya stronghold in the mountains.
Not only was it built centuries before better known Machu Picchu, it’s the largest ancient stone structure in the Americas.
Quaap remains exactly as it’s been for the past 500 years.
The chachapoa architecture is embedded in um in the landscape so well that is really part of the landscape.
We can interpret that it served the function of both an urban center and a fortification.
Quail consists of over 550 structures and archaeologists believe that the city may have had a population close to 4,000.
The magnitude of construction seems to indicate the existence of a unified pre-Inca Chachapoa kingdom.
>> When they faced the Inca occupation or attempts of the Inca to conquer them, they had to reunite to to be stronger against them.
And this is the point where we start to see more of a Chachapoa unity.
The pre-cont people of Amazonus and the Andes created spectacular structures without the tools we take for granted.
>> They also didn’t have the wheel.
If you if you think of something is missing, but they developed such a complex culture that they could build impressive monumental building.
>> Vast stretches of forested terrain still remains unexplored by scientists.
Today, archaeologists strive to document Chachapoa settlements and cliff tombs prior to the arrival of the Spanish.
But adventure tourists and looters were rapidly destroying the archaeological record.
The scientists want to answer the biggest question of all.
Who were the Chachapoa? Spanish records reported that some were tall, fairs skinned, with blonde hair, and other pre-Inca cultures left tantalizing clues.
But the experts don’t agree.
>> We don’t have any reason to think that they were physically different from their neighbors.
It’s an effect of the early Spanish chronicles.
>> Maybe their skin was not as dark, but it’s probably that coastal people were not as dark as people coming from the Titikaka basings.
>> Dr. Kiara Barbieri analyzes the ancestry of people living in the modern town of Chachaoas, many of whom can claim ancestry to the ancient warriors.
We use genetics as a tool to measure relatedness between people.
Not only that, but to access some of the past demographic history of a region.
We study the genetic diversity of the people of today and we are also looking at the genetic diversity of their ancestors of the people from whom they inherited the DNA.
>> By analyzing the genomes of 119 people who currently live in the region, Kiara found that a high indigenous component remained in their DNA.
She supplemented the analysis with family histories over generations.
And so we would go from person to person giving us some information telling us more about the history or directly by being an anonymous um DNA uh participant in the DNA survey.
>> She found that some genetic profiles in modern day Chachapoas were not found anywhere else even in other Andian regions.
>> Possibly they are the descendants of the Chachapa people.
Further evidence that the mighty cloud warriors didn’t disappear completely is found in the language spoken in the modern-day town of Chachapoas.
Their language was possibly this mysterious language cha.
But this might have still persisted until today.
We call it a linguistic substrate.
The way that the people speak today’s is influenced by um the way that their parents were speaking and their grandparents were speaking.
It’s something that we can think of like having an accent >> and the reach of the ancient Chachapoa people may have been wider than some scholars thought.
>> The Chachapoa did not only live in in the cloud forest.
there were populations from this chacha pooa time that lived in bales that live in in higher altitudes uh and so forth.
So the the people that still live in the Amazonas region uh I they can call themselves descendants of these ancient societies.
>> People living in Amazonas today wish to preserve their heritage.
All around the region there is a clear knowledge of the richness of the past.
So everybody who lives there knows about the ancient Chachapoa and it’s part of of their of their heritage.
I would say >> Sonia and Kiier still have much more to investigate and more discoveries to make.
uh the only way to link the genetic diversity of the people who live today in Chachapoas to the ancient Chachapa people is by taking the DNA of the Chachapa people.
So maybe in the future we will have some DNA that comes from from the mummies and then we will be able to make the direct link with the past.
This is the cradle of mankind.
More early man fossils have been found here in South Africa than any other place on Earth.
Here at Rising Star Cave, two enthusiastic cavers, Rick Hunter and Steven Tucker, were about to make the discovery of a lifetime.
>> I’d probably been in and out of this cave about 20 times, and I I thought I knew every inch of it.
And on one Friday night, Rick Hunter and I came to see if there was anything interesting.
And we climbed up this very bad climb, the dragon’s back.
It’s like 20 m high with sheer drops on either side.
And Rick was taking some GoPro footage.
I was basically getting in his way.
He asked me to move into a little crack so he could step over me.
And as I climbed into this little crack straight below me, I noticed that on the one hand, on the one side, the crack was going down further.
So I climbed down it and it just continued and continued going down for 12 m in this very narrow, jagged shaft.
I got to the bottom and suddenly a big chamber opened up in front of me with pristine white stallctite hanging off the floor.
And I immediately called Rick down cuz I was getting excited.
We had discovered something new in the cave.
But that wasn’t all we discovered.
We walked into the chamber a couple of meters and started on the floor.
We started to notice fossils.
So on that very night, Lee Burgerer told me that my life was going to change forever.
>> Lee Burgerer, research professor at the Evolutionary Studies Institute of the University of the Witwaters Rand in South Africa, headed up the project, >> calling for institute scientists around the globe, who were both qualified and small enough to climb into the Dinoi fossil chamber.
>> That looked great down there.
Yeah, brought up a couple little fragments.
>> Dr. Marina Elliot was the first scientist to enter the Dinoi chamber here.
>> The odd one, >> don’t be co.
>> So, the first time I I sort of slid through that hallway into the open area where the chamber is and sort of started looking around.
You know, you’re only wearing a headlamp, so you just see flashes.
But every flash of my headlamp showed bone.
So I think right at that point I realized that we had a lot more than the photo original photographs actually had portrayed.
So that was pretty exciting.
>> When we actually got into the chamber and could start removing it, we realized that not only was there one individual lying there on the surface, but the floor was literally comprised of homoi.
There are thousands and thousands and thousands of remains down in those chambers.
And all you have to do is sweep the surface off and there they are.
To date, over 18,000 fossils of Homonoliti have been discovered in the rising star cave system.
>> Homony isn’t really similar to any known homminin species in its entirety of its package, but it’s almost like a you’ve got little bits and pieces of almost everything we’ve ever found.
Uh parts of the skull, if you just look at it quickly, look a little bit like Homo erectus.
Of course, got a very small brain.
Other parts of the skull look very modern, like homo sapiens.
The fossils showed that Homonyi had a small skull and that many of its features were archaic.
>> It gets stranger and stranger as you move down the body.
You get the ape-like shoulders.
You get these more and more humanlike arms which end with a hand that’s human proportion.
This is a much smaller hand than mine.
When I put the wrist bones in place and then place it in my palm, you’ll see that the thumb is almost the length of my thumb.
yet my hand is clearly obviously a lot bigger.
So that was the first thing.
Big thumb.
And the final strange thing about this hand is how curved it is.
And I don’t really need to do anything to demonstrate that except hold this cast up and show you the extreme curvature.
That curvature is as great as the most primitive members of our lineage.
When we first discovered Homonyi, the the idea was based on its morphology that was going to be millions of years old.
That meant we couldn’t even guess what the age of home owner was.
That led us on a a search for laboratories and specialists around the world that would either invent technology, improve technology to to date these fossils.
>> One of the scientists tasked with the complexity of determining an accurate age for the newest member of the human family was Dr. Renault Johannes Bayou of Southern Cross University in Australia.
He’s a specialist in electron spin resonance or ESR dating which can determine the age of homonyi teeth by measuring the natural radiation they have absorbed over time.
>> ESR dating uh is the only one that can go back in time sufficiently to actually cover human evolution and date directly the fossil.
uh most of the other technique will date the sediments around the fossil and then you have to assume that the age of the fossil is the same as the dating of the sediments around.
ESR analyzes the behavior of electrons within the crystallin structures of the tooth and can determine from this very accurately how many years the tooth has absorbed the earth’s natural radiation and so provide a date to the fossil.
By dating the actual teeth, an accurate age for homonyi could be determined.
Initially, its age was estimated to be between 1 and 2 million years old, in the same range as this nearby find of Australopycus sada.
But the new dating technology was about to astound the world.
I was actually at the London Natural History Museum and Oman already was on the wall and then there was estimated age between 1.
2 and 1.
8 million years.
But then when we actually did the scientific dating of those teeth, this is when things got very interesting because then we got an age of 200 to 300,000 years old.
So much much younger in the human evolution actually overlapping with homo sapiens.
When we got a date was much younger than that, a quarter of a million years give or take.
We realized that we were dealing with a primitive creature almost like a time traveler that had come down from deep time.
The species clearly originates there.
That’s where its morphology originates and it come down through time invisible to us in the fossil record to a point where it is very possible that was in direct contact with the emergence of modern humans.
We never thought that was possible in Africa until this moment.
We thought that there was effectively during that entire time period of the middle plyine, late middle plyene, one form, a bigrained form of homo sapiens.
Now there are two and that adds incredible complexity to our record.
Homonyi comes out equidistant from for example homo erectus as it does from homo sapiens.
Uh, homie would be an equally likely ancestor to modern humans as Homo erectus.
>> The anatomy isn’t lying to us.
It’s telling us something real.
Nleti comes from a very ancient time.
Netti was the size of a very small human.
It stood about 1.
3 1.
4 m at the most.
And and yet its legs were relatively long in that.
And that tells us that it was probably a very effective long-d distanceance walker, possibly a runner.
It was moving around the landscape in a in an entirely human-like way.
And that’s really fascinating because it may not have been the only human-like creature on this landscape, but archaic humans or even early modern humans might have been here at the same time.
>> Homonyi may also have buried their dead.
The fossils were often intact, held together by soft tissue.
>> There was none of the typical damage.
We could see that it wasn’t a mass death.
see that water hadn’t washed them in there.
And what was I guess most remarkable is they were alone.
They were the only species in it.
Um, and we came to the conclusion obviously that this was perhaps a deliberate body disposal site.
We’re still remarkably uh this long down the line still hypothesizing that Homonyi did something that we thought previously unique only to modern humans.
deliberately disposed of its dead in a ritualized fashion.
Then of course we found a second chamber that’s practically like the first one.
>> The Letti chamber, also inside the same cave system, is yielding as rich a trove of Homonetti fossils as the original Dinoi chamber.
>> Here, Lee and John man the command center for the new excavation.
>> The Letti chamber is amazing.
>> Scientists are unearthing new discoveries about our ancestors daily.
Some of them are very complete like the Naoskeleton.
They are identical.
We hypothesize now they’re probably from the same time period.
It is a remarkable situation.
It’s as rich in many ways as Denalleti chamber.
I can’t wait till we find the next one.
In the past four years, new discoveries in the cradle of mankind have changed the landscape of evolution forever.
Has the cradle offered us all its secrets? Not only do I not think that there aren’t more sites out there, I know there are more sites out there.
In 2003, I had been here for 3 months working in the cave.
I was sitting on a section of sediment that we they were about to excavate the next day.
So, we were taking this sample, luminescence sample, uh, and then I left Indonesia and by the time I had got back to Australia, I walked into my supervisor’s office and the first thing he said to me was, “They found a skeleton”.
And I couldn’t believe it.
I was like, “You’re joking.
I was only there two days ago”.
And they were like the section that you took the sample from where you were sitting.
I was literally sitting on top of the skeleton.
And obviously we had no idea.
Yeah.
foreign Rockus Airway.
Okay.
Okay.
for vlog hotel.
We all just assumed it was a juvenile, but Rockus Rockus was the first to say, “No, I I don’t think it’s juvenile”.
Because he could see the wisdom teeth were fully erupted towards the back.
So, it was an adult.
We had an adult that was fully grown.
It was It was a shock.
>> How could a human ancestor standing at only 3 and 1/2 ft be so small? the smallest of all in the entire Homo lineage.
Intriguingly, the key to the mystery lies in the geography of the island where it was found.
Flores is an island.
It’s been an island for a very long time.
And we know that when creatures get marooned on islands, strange things happen to them.
>> >> Large animals can dwarf down on these islands because that’s an evolutionary advantage.
To be smaller bodied, they’re using less resources.
So more individuals could be supported.
>> An animal that is living today that has uh undergone through a process of dwarfism is the uh the dwarf water buffalo in Sulowi, the Anoa.
So genetically it’s very closely related to the Asian water buffalo but it’s about half the height at the shoulder compared to its ancestor.
So that’s one example.
There is dwarf hippos on the island of Cyprus and also in Madagascar.
>> Paleoanthropologist Dr. Garrett Vandenberg spent decades studying how island isolation can shape the way species evolve.
What me interests most in in in the research in in Flores is um that it’s the only island where you can actually test the hypothesis of island dwarfing because you have several layers where there is a bone bed with with fossils well dated and then uh there’s another bone bed well dated and then you have another bone bed well dated and then you have Leon Bua also So well dated.
>> Dr. Vandenberg focuses on Stegodon fossils, ancient relatives of elephants because their abundant remains provide a detailed record for studying evolutionary change.
>> In the oldest layer at Kovatoua where we are excavating now, we have the biggest tigeron.
Then a slightly younger layer.
they are a bit smaller and then higher level still on average bit smaller but still overlapping.
But yeah, those things you would not be able to figure out if you have only a handful of fossils as with homminins is usually the case.
Back in the plea scene, no self-respecting island uh would be without its tiny elephant.
Uh, Malta, Sardinia, Sicily, each had their own tiny elephants.
Flores had its tiny elephants and tiny people.
Why not with tiny brains? It began to seem that humans, like other animals, could also be shaped by their environment.
Because of its tiny size, researchers fondly dubbed the little human the man of flores or homo floresensis the hobbit.
>> But the more they studied the fossils, the more enigmatic the discovery became.
>> There wasn’t a single most surprising thing about it.
There were so many things.
First of all, the very small brain size, an apesized brain.
Homoensis in many ways looks very primitive.
It’s got these peculiar hands, very peculiar feet.
It is a clear package of features that we can immediately recognize as being different.
From the head to the toe, you can see that there are a mix of features that in some ways are like us, in some ways are like living apes, in other ways like other fossil species of human.
The question is where and when did it branch off of the lineage that ultimately also led to us and Neandertols and Denisvens.
It was looking archaic.
So we’re like, why on earth is this archaic species here um in Flores at such a young age? >> It seemed extraordinary that something so apparently primitive and small brain could have survived so late in time.
It looks more like the ancient African homminin that was around before the genus homo.
>> So there there was just so many questions and you know it took us a long time to kind of work through all those kind of issues and to try and work out really what it was and why it was there.
The discoverers studied the bones in secret for a year before almost hesitantly they’ve submitted their findings to the prestigious science journal Nature.
>> I didn’t know quite what to make of it initially and the reason was that the people writing it didn’t know what to make of it either.
In between the lines of this paper that said, “We have found this strange smallbodied homminin was written, “Help me.
What is this?” The peer review process lasted several months, prompting the authors to confirm that the remains represented a previously unknown species of hominin.
>> We began to think that this is this small human is something big.
A team of Australian and Indonesian archaeologists has discovered the remains of what’s believed to be a new species of human.
The Hobbit sparked a bitter dispute.
Some hailed it as one of the most significant finds in the history of paleo anthropology.
Others dismissed it as one of the field’s greatest blunders.
>> I don’t believe it.
There is only one skull.
That’s not a proof of anything at all.
>> It just invites tremendous skepticism.
>> A group of anthropologists, other scientists who frankly didn’t accept that this was a real thing.
Either it was a fake, a forgery, or it was maybe even a homosapian suffering from some kind of disease.
>> So I feel like at one point it was disease of the week.
There were so many diseases that apparently homophoresensis had that would um explain the the size and um the morphology but we kept saying but it it doesn’t have a chin.
The the bony morphology where the two halves of the lower jaw come together in homophensis is not like homo sapiens at all.
So here when we look at this aspect of the the lower jaw in modern humans what happens is we have sort of an inverted t-morphology where this part of the uh bone has been pushed forward but instead with with homorphysiensis uh it’s it it kind of slopes posteriorly here but also retains this very thick morphology in the back so it’s supported and buttressed if you will with bone.
We simply don’t have that.
>> Sometimes there’s a refusal to believe in extraordinary evidence no matter how much you uh you strive to substantiate it.
>> But there was another reason why the announcement of the discovery met with disbelief.
Stone tools were found right next to the skeleton.
>> Almost indistinguishable from stone tools made by homo sapiens.
>> Which means that homo florenences used very sophisticated techniques for making these types of stone tools.
Uh a lot of flakes we found in hobbit layer and also modern humans working like this.
So which mean that really smart because this technique we found continuity from the hobbit layer and also modern humans.
So there is no differences in technique only similarities.
However, it is the type of raw material which distinguishes the stone artifacts.
Homo sapiens used better quality stones than hobbit layer which used lower quality raw materials.
We have two type of raw material here which is uh mostly found in hobbit layer and also modern human layer.
Uh the first one here we have uh uh the better quality called church and the second one we have here called iron rich church which is low quality compared to the first one.
This raw material is easy to find in in the river.
That’s why I think they mostly use this raw material than compared to the short one.
>> Homophoresensis would use stone tools to butcher and consume animal tissue.
That edge leaves a very distinct kind of mark as well.
One of the telltale signs turned out to be a tiny handbone that had gone unnoticed until by chance Matt Toerry happened to catch a glimpse of it.
>> And I immediately saw uh that the wrist looked like the wrist of an African ape or much more African apeike than any other human wrist that I’d ever looked at.
I was sort of shocked because now all of a sudden instead of hearing all of these different voices arguing about the small head or the the the body size, there were these bones that were saying something pretty important.
I can still remember feeling like my knees were buckling, like I was going to fall to the ground because I was so astonished.
partly one that it had that anatomy and then second of all that I couldn’t believe that it hadn’t been brought up yet.
>> The hobbits weren’t a small member of our own species.
They were something entirely different.
>> This is a distinct kind of human um primitive in some ways but like us in other ways and probably one with a very deep evolutionary history in that region of Southeast Asia.
The discovery captured the world’s imagination and questioned what had previously been thought about human evolution.
It also shows us that human evolution isn’t just about evolving a big brain and becoming homo sapiens.
[snorts] >> Whenever people ask me what the most exciting paper was that I’ve ever handled as an editor at Nature, Homo Flores is the one.
No question.
and I’ve handled the first feathered dinosaurs.
I’ve dealt with a lot of exciting new things.
Um, but Homo Flores showed that in one little corner of the world until quite recently, there was a little human creature that was obscurely related to us, but changed in remarkable ways that no one had expected.
They basically give us an example of how you can still be human but be human in a very different way than it is in homo sapiens and that’s really special.
I think >> I’m a fan of Tolken and Middle Earth.
And um it wasn’t me that called the creature the Hobbit, but it was true that in the Tolken’s fantasy Middle Earth, there are lots of humanlike creatures living together in one space.
There were humans, elves, dwarves, orcs, ants, all kind of homoid creatures.
But the earth was really like that until about 50,000 years ago when modern humans came along and swept everything away.
And I think it’s very sad that we only have one species of homminin around at the moment, homo sapiens.
Partly because we have no one similar enough to us to talk to but different enough from us who might have a completely different perspective on existence of the world.
Um, that I think is the tragedy of modern humans.
>> Homo sapiens didn’t invent what it means to be human.
We inherited it from a family full of explorers, innovators, survivors.
We weren’t the first to wander.
And we might not be the last.
There were more ways to be human.
