It’s early in the morning on the grasslands of South America some 50,000 years ago, and this woman of West African descent is taking her tame saber-toothed cat (Smilodon populator) on a walk.
Some of the inspiration for this piece came from reports of stone tools and the remains of hearth fires being found at Serra da Capivara National Park in Brazil, which possibly date back to 48,000 years ago or more. This would predate the colonization of the Americas by the ancestors of modern Native Americans by over thirty thousand years. Dr. Niede Guidon, one of the archaeologists who worked on the site, has suggested that these earlier settlers may have come to Brazil from Africa across the Atlantic as far back 100,000 years ago. If so, they appear to have left little if any genetic trace on today’s Native Americans, who would have arrived from northeastern Asia rather than Africa.