Patagonia's People: The primitive
The first men arrived to the southern edge of Patagonia
and the Tierra del Fuego
Channels ten thousand years ago. Their ethnical origins were
diverse but surely all of them came in from the north and belonged
to tribes that crossed the Bering Strait during the glacial age.
During their development, these tribes inherited from other
ones the same material, spiritual and racial influences.
We know very little about them: Their houses were semicircular
and buried up to their halves. These men fished and hunted, and
for fishing they used boats and harpoons. They also collected mollusks.
Patagonia, being the tip of South America's funnel, constitutes
a "cornering area". This makes it ethnically conservative,
which means that it is possible to find racial and cultural features
as those found in fishermen, hunters and collectors.
At the Magellan Strait area there are currently two dominant
ethnic types, which descend from those of the old days: The
canoe aborigines (alacalufes and yámanas or yaganes) and
the land aborigines (Onas in the Tierra del Fuego Island and Tehuelches
or Patagones in the continent.
At the Tierra del Fuego archipelagos, human presence took longer
to appear. Apparently, most part of that migration came in by
the sea, through Pacific Ocean.
Patagonian civilizations were nomad, reason for which there
are neither remainders of towns or buildings nor written documents
or any kind of cultural expression connected to their development.
But there are stone constructions, semicircular shelters used for
temporary lodging of groups of hunters, as well as pyramidal
burial mounds.
Surprisingly, there are abundant imprints and paintings,
some of them in excellent conditions like the ones at "Cueva
de las Manos" (Hands Cave), to the shores of River Pinturas,
in Province of Santa Cruz.
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