Although it's already been discussed by the Archaeology News Network and their podcast on Spotify, the findings made by several archaeologists published last October are worth considering. According to a new ScienceAdvances article, the presence of charcoal in several peat cores on the coast and on the islands of East Falkland (Mount Usborne), Bleaker Island and New Island show periods of fire activity beginning at around 1,000 years ago, or more precisely around 1350 - 1400 CE.
This is well before, around 120 years, Ferdinand Magellan ventured through the straits to find a way across to the Pacific Ocean, and for comparison the article includes more well-known fire actity from 250 years ago, when the French and British colonized the island and forcibly resettled the remaining Yaghan, Selknam and other tribal groups from the Tierra del Fuego. So, given that there's no evidence for drastic sea level changes thousands of years ago which could have left an indigenous population originally from the mainland stranded as sea levels rose, the implication is that the Falklands were reached by a pre-contact population by sea. But who were they?
The article then turns to the faunal assemblages present on the islands. In particular, it argues that the extinct Falklands wolf, the warrah (Dusicyon australis) was introduced by an arriving population, a species that diverged in prehistory from Dusicyon avus, a south American fox that went extinct around 1700 CE. Supporting this, several midden-like assemblages of sea lion and penguin bones, which bear marks that suggest that they were the prey of choice for the warrah.
There have also been isolated reports of stone tools and harpoons in the Falklands, in proximity to the piles of shellfish, seal and penguin bones, made of locally sourced quartzite and similar to those made by the Yaghan and other Fuegoan peoples in prehistory. The evidence is most abundant on New Island, the closest to Tierra del Fuego These can hardly be dated to a certain time period, however, but it at least hints at an intermittent human presence in the Falklands before European colonization.
I would agree with the article in that the fire activity, the introduction of wolves and the diet evidently adopted by the arrivals is consisted with the Yaghan of historical records, were noted for their maritime ways of life, and their custom to sleep naked on the open landscape beside hearths, resting soundly as European observers shivered under fur coats. The last person who was able to claim Yaghan / Yamana ancestry, the Abuela Cristina Calderón, died early this year due to coronavirus complications.
This, then, represents an extraordinary achievement. The Yaghan, the Selknam and the Haush of the peninsula shared a common worldview of the cosmos, as segmented by cardinal directions; believing the East to be the centre of the earth and the source of spiritual power. Travellers to the Falkland Islands would have been mesmerised by the rocky island landscape, perhaps believing it to be a spirit world meant for the spirits alone. Just possibly, this belief of a spiritual East recorded in ethnographic accounts might have stemmed from an oral tradition, spun by travellers returning home from the Falklands.
If the Yaghan did indeed visit the Falklands, how? Darwin's account of the HMS Beagle visiting the archipelago cursorily mentions canoes spotted along the coast, and from ethnographic and archaeological evidence, it is well known that the Yaghan were able to built canoes sturdy enough for long sea voyages to hunt seals and fish. The first visitors to the Falklands were probably there by chance, blown off course during coastal fishing by a storm and carried by the wildlife-rich Falkland Current.
On the other hand, there is no reason why an adventurous spirit could not have been stirred by Yaghan fishermen; perhaps they saw gulls or albatrosses coming from the horizon and wandered where they may have come from. Haush communities, being at the very tip of the Land of Fire, might have joined them; their activities generally have left little archaeological trace, so there does not need to be a distinct material culture on the islands to raise that possibility.
All this evidence is very exciting, but I would think that several other pieces of the puzzle, such as aDNA evidence and isotopic data (perhaps from warrah bones) that might suggest movement from the continent, are needed to seal the deal.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/wolf-falkland-islands-origin-ancient-human-visitors-fire-hunt
References:
Hamley, K. M., Gill, J. L., Krasinski, K. E., Groff, D. V., Hall, B. L., Sandweiss, D. H., ... & Lowell, T. V. (2021). Evidence of prehistoric human activity in the Falkland Islands. Science advances, 7(44), eabh3803.
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