The largest and oldest concentration of prehistoric sites in the Americas, 1,291 square kilometres of canyon country in Piauí holding hundreds of painted rock shelters. It is also the middle of the biggest argument in New World archaeology. The standard account has people arriving in the Americas somewhere under 20,000 years ago, and the stone tools from Toca da Tira Peia here have been dated by optically stimulated luminescence to possibly 22,000, with claims from Pedra Furada running far older still. Niède Guidon spent a career defending those dates and much of the field spent the same career disputing them, mostly over whether the objects are tools at all. Nobody disputes the paintings. UNESCO listed it in 1991. The bearded capuchins in the park have the largest known tool kit of any wild capuchin, which is a pointed thing to find at a site arguing about who was making tools here first.
Piauí, Brazil
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