It has been generally believed that the first whalers came from the Northern Hemisphere and threw their harpoons into icy seas. They took the risk because they lacked many natural resources and, if they didn't want to starve, they had few alternatives. New research presents a different story. According to the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (ICTA-UAB) and the UAB's Department of Prehistory, indigenous communities in southern Brazil were hunting large cetaceans 5,000 years ago, about a thousand years before the first documented evidence in Arctic and Pacific societies. Specifically, these intrepid whalers came from Babitonga Bay in southern Brazil. "They were probably young men seeking social recognition and increased prestige. They shouldn't have ventured too far out to sea, because southern right whales, for example, come very close to the shore," says André Carlo Colonese, who co-authored the article with Krista McGrath, published this Friday in the magazine. Nature Communications"The most likely hypothesis is that they went hunting in boats made from a single log, sometimes more than five or seven meters long, which could carry about thirty people, and they must have set out in groups," Colonese explains. They threw harpoons and waited for the whale, exhausted, to drown. "To prevent it from sinking, they most likely used floats made from the intestines of large animals," he adds. To document and demonstrate that whales were already being hunted on the coasts of Brazil more than 5,000 years ago, researchers have followed the trail of the sambaquis, the monumental mounds of shells that these Holocene societies built along the coast. They have analyzed hundreds of cetacean bone remains from these small mountains, which are more than 6,000 years old and could reach 30 meters in height. "Many mounds have disappeared because, from colonization until the 1960s, when the first heritage protection laws were enacted, they were looted primarily for lime production," explains Colonese. Fortunately, some pioneering archaeologists, such as the German Guilherme Tiburtius, saved part of this ancestral heritage, which is currently preserved in the Sambaquis Archaeological Museum in Joinville, Brazil. The sambaquis contained the remains of southern right whales, humpback whales, blue whales, northern right whales, sperm whales, and dolphins, many with clear cut marks associated with butchering. Large harpoons made of whalebone have also been found, some of the largest discovered in South America.

In 2007, a team of hunters and scientists from the Inupiad, an Arctic people, captured a whale in the Bering Sea, near the coastal town of Utqiaġvik. During the processing of the animal, they made an exceptional discovery: they found metal fragments of a 19th-century explosive harpoon embedded in the subcutaneous tissue. Since these harpoons had not been used for over 120 years, it allowed them to estimate that this whale could be between 115 and 130 years old, or even older. This finding reinforced the now well-established hypothesis that bowhead whales are the longest-living mammals on the planet, with individuals that can exceed 200 years.

That orcas and other marine animals need to scratch is nothing new. It has been known for years that several species of orcas do what is known as kelp: Scrubbing seaweed with your head, fins, and body to remove parasites and keep your skin healthy.allokelping.

In its founding manifesto, the ARA noted its desire to address diverse audiences, including "the scientific community," and explicitly mentions "sustainability." This commitment to environmental stewardship has been amply demonstrated over its fifteen-year history.