2023-11-28 18:39:00
The opportunistic treasure hunters who searched its depths thought they would find riches hidden by the Jesuits. In the hundreds of tunnels scattered across Brazil, most of them hidden because they were filled with sediment, they ultimately found only dust… and deep scratches embedded in the walls.
For many years, locals and scientists thought they were the work of ancient civilizations, potentially made with a pickaxe.
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Their study ultimately revealed a completely different reality: they were dug by megafauna, a sloth (Mylodontoidea) of us (Glyptodon) giants less than 10,000 years ago. If over the last fifteen years, more than 1,500 “paleoterriers” have been recorded in Brazil, according to BBC Travel – making it the region with the highest concentration of Paleolithic tunnels made by colossal extinct animals – project researchers Paleotocas continue to analyze its every nook and cranny. They regularly present the results of their fascinating work in progress.
Paleotocas are the gigantic fossilized burrows of South American mammals that became extinct regarding 10,000 years ago. So far they have all been found in Brazil, in several you can see the claw marks of their original owners on the walls. pic.twitter.com/IBcRsgFl3U
— Luis Recalde (@Drunken_Forest) July 8, 2018
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Giant sloths far from being “supporters of the least effort”
The identified palaeoterriers are of exceptional size, reaching 1.5 meters in height, 3 meters in width and 30 to 40 meters in length. Animals do not dig tunnels much wider than their bodies, to remain protected, the dug holes testify to the importance of the size of the armadillos crossing them, the size of a car, or even ancient sloths.
The latter were in fact very different from the small arboreals of today’s tropical forests. On four legs (or even sometimes bipedal), they might measure four meters in length and weigh up to four tonnes for Megatheriuma creature comparable to a “hamster the size of an elephant”.
It is, however, more likely that the galleries mentioned here are actually the creation of relatively smaller cousins, Scelidotherium or Mylodon, For example. Between 15 million and 10,000 years ago, nearly a hundred different species roamed the Americas, fossils suggest.
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Renewed interest in palaeoterriers in recent years
Even before they fascinated scientists, the significant traces left by these immense land mammals seemed already known to regional indigenous communities.
BBC Travel gives us as an example the Kaingang people, indigenous to the south and southeast of Brazil (State of Rio Grande do Sul, at the tip of the country). One of their oral folk tales tells the story of a family, descended into a hole dug by an armadillo to take advantage of the abundance of food there, and hide from non-natives.
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However, as a specialist in the cultural and territorial transformations of the Kaingang indicates, among the latter, “there are no myths, because everything told by older indigenous people is considered true”.
Over the years, around a hundred palaeoterriers have been distinguished in this very special region. But they experienced a resurgence of interest around 2009, the year one of them was discovered by a farmer. While walking through his cornfield, he came across an underground cavity beneath the dry soil. And in this “oversized rabbit maze” dark and cool, as our colleagues describe it, researchers curious regarding this unusual find were fascinated: the extraordinarily frozen marks in the walls were certainly not made by the hand of man.
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We analyzed the bones of animals that lived in this region over the past two million years. Animals such as horses, sabre-toothed tigers, elephants did not dig. You have to look for animals that have claws, and there are only two possibilities: giant sloths and giant armadillos. — Heinrich Theodor Frank, professional geologist and palaeoterrier expert interviewed by BBC Travel.
Questions still pending
About ten years later, scientists are still studying them, looking for remains of ancient fur which would make it possible to identify the species concerned, in particular.
They are also currently mapping the Paleolithic tunnel of Tatu’s Den (“armadillo burrow”) of the state of Santa Catarina — where mysterious cave paintings, triangles resembling mountains, have also been identified within it. The objective is to identify patterns, potential indicators of the biomechanisms at play during the digging of large installations. According to specialists, there are still years of research in the field.
For the moment, they do not know why such large animals would want to burrow in such large cavities. They speculate that they may have been built to nurse young, regulate body temperature or even hibernate. Sloths like giant armadillos would have had to develop “absurd strength” in their arms to do so. Another hypothesis would be that each tunnel was built over several centuries or even thousands of years, by animals organized in social groups, shaping generation following generation a large cave useful for unknown needs.
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Another question weighs on the location of the paleoburrows, concentrated in the states of Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina, a hub for paleontological research – although some have been spotted in Minas Gerais further north (on the other hand, still in the south of Brazil). A handful can be counted in a more global South America, without any having been reported in North America, where these animals nevertheless evolved; megafauna moved across the continent. Here once more, there are many theories, but the mystery remains to be solved.
On the same topic :
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