Some of the oldest harpoons ever found reveal Indigenous people in Brazil were hunting whales 5,000 years ago
Harpoons made from the bones of humpback and southern right whales show that indigenous groups in what is now Brazil hunted whales 5,000 years ago.
The discovery, which included 118 whale bones and artifacts, reveals that prehistoric whaling was not limited to populations in temperate and polar climates of the Northern Hemisphere, according to a study published Jan. 9 in the journal Natural communications.
“Whaling has always been enigmatic” because it is difficult to distinguish bone tools made from actively hunted and stranded animals in the archaeological record, study co-author André Carlo Coloneseresearch director at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, told Live Science.
The new tools are therefore important because their discovery, alongside multiple skeletal remains of members of the same species, represents some of the oldest evidence of active whaling in the world, the authors wrote in the study.
Prehistoric whaling
For prehistoric people, whales provided immense feasts, oil for warmth and bones for tools and cultural ornaments and accessories. Although coastal communities have opportunistically recovered these resources from stranded whales for at least 20,000 yearsevidence of active hunting is much more recent. For example, people hunted large whales with deer bone harpoons 6,000 years ago in what is now South Korea, and harpoons from all over the world 3,500 to 2,500 years ago have been discovered in the Arctic and sub-Arctic.
Colonese and his team did not initially plan to investigate whaling. Instead, they were trying to document the marine species used by the indigenous Sambaqui people of southern Brazil. To do this, they analyzed the molecular signature of precolonial cetacean bones (whale, dolphin and porpoise) at the Joinville Sambaqui archaeological museum in Brazil. Of the 118 skeletal remains of an identifiable cetacean species, most came from southern right whales, but many bones came from humpback whales. Only 37 of them had been made into objects such as pendants.
It was “completely by chance” that one of the museum’s curators pulled out a box containing what was thought to be sticks, Colonese said. But because of their design, like the hollow centers for a wooden handle and the carved tips, he immediately recognized them as harpoons. The team identified 15 harpoon elements, including heads and stem components, made from southern right whale or humpback whale rib bones.
The researchers took tiny samples from two harpoon forward stems to determine their ages, which revealed the tools were between 4,710 and 4,970 years old. Colonese said he jumped for joy when he saw the results, because they are some of the oldest harpoons found in the world – more than 1,000 years older than Arctic and subarctic examples.
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The discovery also showed that these indigenous populations in Brazil were not just harvesting molluscs and catching fish. “The conventional idea was that the Sambaquis “They didn’t have the technology” to hunt whales, Colonese said. “That tells us they were actually hunting.”
“This is a very spectacular and instructive discovery,” Jean-Marc Petillonan archaeologist from the University of Toulouse in France who was not involved in the research, told Live Science.
Although it is unclear whether these particular harpoons were used to hunt whales – unlike other marine animals, such as seals – this new evidence helps contradict the hypothesis that whaling was only practiced in the northern hemisphere, according to Pétillon.
“The fact that these people live in southern Brazil in tropical conditions and also practice whaling is also a way of changing our perspective on these maritime exploitation systems,” he said.
McGrath, K., Montes, TAKdS, Fossil, T. et al. Molecular and zooarchaeological identification of 5000 year old whale bone harpoons on the Brazilian coast. Nat Common 17, 48 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-67530-w
