The first clue sits in a museum drawer, not on a windswept Arctic shore. It is a whale bone, marked and shaped by human hands. Around it are more bones, more tools, and a coastal story that reaches back 5,000 years. New research from the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and the Department of Prehistory of the UAB says Indigenous communities in southern Brazil hunted large whales far earlier than scholars once believed. The work places active whaling in Babitonga Bay, in Brazil’s Santa Catarina state, about a thousand years before the earliest documented evidence from Arctic and North Pacific societies. If you have ever pictured early whaling as a Northern Hemisphere breakthrough, this study asks you to redraw the map. The researchers argue these coastal communities built specialized tools, planned strategies, and social systems that made large-whale hunting possible long before the timeline most textbooks imply. Location of known sambaqui sites in the region of Babitonga Bay, in Santa Catarina state (southern Brazil). (CREDIT: Nature Communications) Shell …