Ruins of 5,600-year-old shelter upend history of Caribbean island, study reveals
New research reveals that Curacao, an island nation in the Caribbean Sea, was occupied by humans centuries earlier than previously thought.
People first inhabited the island between 5,735 and 5,600 years ago, pushing their established time of arrival back between 290 and 850 years, according to a study published on March 12 in the Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology.
Researchers at Canada’s Simon Fraser University (SFU) made this discovery after radiocarbon dating charcoal from an ancient rock shelter on the island, known as Saliña Sint Marie, in the summer of 2022.
The shelter is now the earliest known site of human habitation on the island, located about 40 miles north of Venezuela.
“What this new information does is push the initial exploration in this region back to a time where other islands to the north of Curaçao are also being settled,” Christina Giovas, an SFU professor and co-author of the study, said in a university news release.
“This suggests that the movement of people from the continental mainland into those more northern islands might have entangled with some of the movement of the people into Curaçao,” Giovas added.
Curacao, measuring only 38 miles in length, was first visited by European travelers in 1499, and later settled by the Dutch and Spanish, according to Britannica. It gained its independence from the Netherlands in 2010.
How exactly humans expanded into the Caribbean islands has long been a mystery. But a 2020 study, published in the journal Science Advances, indicates that early humans first left South America and headed to the region about 5,800 years ago — up to just 200 years before Curacao was settled.
Cuba appears to have been occupied first, followed by Hispaniola — the island encompassing Haiti and the Dominican Republic — and Puerto Rico. Later, humans traveled to smaller, more southern islands in the region, including St. Martin, St. Kitts and Antigua.
SFU researchers plan to return to Curacao in 2025 to further study human development on the island.
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