WHERE IS THE BEST EVIDENCE? COMPARING THE VIGOR OF HUMAN-MEGAFAUNAL EXPLOITATION BETWEEN NORTH AND SOUTH AMERICAS

During the late Quaternary, humans hunted megafauna across all continents while spread out of Africa. In New World, archaeologists consider North America (NA) as the continent with the highest exploitation vigor in Megafaunal Kill/Scavenge Site (MKSs). Nevertheless, MKSs for South America (SA) have insistently been underestimated or even neglected by researchers, biasing further analyses as the human impact on megafauna extinctions. Here, we sought for MKSs in both continents and tested if the human-megafaunal exploitation vigor in NA outnumbers that from SA. The vigor of exploitation evidence was accessed by: i) ranking the exploitation force per MKS (the site rank outcomes from the sum of exploited taxon ranks, which ranges from 1 to 4 according to the groups of the exploitation strength), and ii) quantifying the unquestionable or accept human-made evidence per annihilated taxon and MKS. Both continents revealed 17 MKS each one, and the exploitation vigor in NA did not outnumber that from SA. Conversely, NA presented poorer-quality exploitation evidence than SA, with a half of continental ranking (36 vs. 72, respectively; Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney test: W = 61, p-value = 0.002, one-tail null hypothesis-H0: NA>SA) and ~17% lesser continental quality (0.386 vs. 0.452; Student t-test: t= -1.2, df = 24.9, p-value = 0.12, one-tail null hypothesis-H0: NA>SA). Our findings indicate that the exploitation vigor of North American MKSs has biasedly been overestimated in relation to the South American landscapes. SA presents better-quality evidence for both vigor categories, which suggest SA portraits good or even better information on human-megafaunal exploitation than NA. Our results corroborate the Borrero's argument that, contrary to stressed by archaeologists, SA is relatively well exploited; however, most of their studies are published in Latin languages rather than English, the common scientific language used nowadays. We conclude that it is time for archaeologists breaking the English barrier and start looking for South American researches published in Portuguese and Spanish. [INCT-EECBio/CNPq/MCTIC].