Palaeo-Indian Meso-America

Reconstruction of the face of Naia, a teenage girl who lived in Mexico over 12,000 years ago. (National Geographic)

Palaeo-Indian Meso-America (c. -18,000 to -8,000) was Meso-America during the Stone Age, when it still had mammoths, ground sloths, sabretooth cats, horses, and camels. The 2,000 years of climate change that followed the ice age brought that world to an end.

First people: Palaeo-Indians were the first people to live in Meso-America. No one is sure when they first arrived. They may have arrived by the year -31,000, most likely by -18,000, and most certainly by -10,800.

• Location: Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras.
• Size: Fewer than 1 million people.
• Cities: none, just seasonal campsites
• Languages: unknown.
• Religion: shamanism, which will become the bedrock of Meso-American religion. Not only did humans and animals have souls, so did trees, rivers, and mountains.
• Technology: Clovis spear points, knives, spear-throwers (the atlatl), etc. No bows and arrows – they came much later.
• Economy: some trade, mainly hunting and gathering. Hunted mammoths (Mammuthus imperator).
• Social structure: bands of hunter-gatherers made up of a few families, often led by a shaman. No class structure. Kinship was everything. Each band moved over a set range according to the season, setting up campsites along the way.
• History:
  • -31,000: some evidence of people already in Meso-America
  • -18,000: good evidence of people in Meso-America, maybe descended from seal hunters who followed the kelp highway along the Pacific coast.
  • -11,000: mammoth hunters arrive with Clovis technology. Crossed the Bering land bridge a thousand years before.
  • -10,800: A teenage girl, now called Naia (pictured at top), fell to the the bottom of Hoyo Negro, a deep cave now underwater in Yucatan, Mexico. She was descended from Siberian mammoth hunters (mitochondrial haplogroup D).
  • -10,000: Climate change: Meso-America becomes hotter and wetter. Big game animals begin dying out, either because of climate change or over-hunting or both. Whatever the cause, it leaves Meso-America without any beasts of burden.
  • -8,120: The poisonous seeds of Sophora secundiflora being used as a hallucinogen, probably by shamans.
  • -8,000: Meso-America now has pretty much the climate, plants, and animals of today.

Mammuthus imperator

Feast and famine: They had no way to store food. They did not even have pots. So after a successful mammoth hunt, a feast was required. They needed the protein and fat. Most of their food, though, came not from hunting but gathering, foraging for plant food.

atlatl (spear thrower)

Rich and poor: none, because they were always on the move and therefore had few material possessions. They had no way to store up wealth and pass it on.

Rules and regulations: none. It was a face-to-face society. You almost never dealt with someone you did not know personally.

Rabbit on the Moon: They saw a Rabbit on the Moon, not a Man on the Moon. They saw the earth in terms of the four directions, each direction having its own colour, special plants and animals, etc. We know that because these are cultural features found both in Meso-America and on the other side of the Bering Sea. So were:

Shamans: They were mostly men, some were women. They could see the future, cure disease, find good places to hunt, talk to the spirit world, etc.

– Abagond, 2018.

Sources: mainly Google Images; “Ancient Mexico & Central America” (2004) by Susan Toby Evans; “The Maya” (1999) by Michael D. Coe; “The First American” by Glenn Hodges in the January 2015 issue of National Geographic. 

See also:

• Welcome to Native American Heritage Month 2018
• Palaeo-Indians
• Meso-America
• North America: a brief history
• shaman
• climate change

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