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A new study indicates that one of the largest of the Indigenous language families in Latin America originated in the sixth century BCE in the basin of the Rio Tapajós and Rio Xingu, near the present-day city of Santarém in the Brazilian state of Pará.There are around fifty languages in the Tupí-Guaraní language family, which gave us words like "jaguar" and "piranha." Now, Dr. Fabrício Ferraz Gerardi from the University of Tübingen's Institute of Linguistics and a team of international researchers have used methods developed in the field of molecular biology to compare and investigate the Tupí-Guaraní languages. This has...

An ancient ceremonial building that was built thousands of years ago in northwestern Peru's La Libertad region was decorated with a painting of a spider deity clutching a knife. Archaeologists discovered the mural in November 2020, after local farmers damaged the temple structure during the expansion of their sugar cane and avocado plantations. When scientists inspected the monument ("huaca" in the Indigenous Quechuan family of languages), they found a figure painted against a white background on the southern wall, in shades of ocher, yellow and gray.... The wall holding the spider god mural faces a river bisecting the Virú Valley,...

Pre-Columbian tunnel complex discovered in southeastern Peru Story Filed: Thursday, August 15, 2002 8:40 AM EST Lima, Aug 15, 2002 (EFE via COMTEX) -- A pre-Columbian tunnel complex has been discovered in southeastern Peru, officials said. Chumbivilcas Mayor Florentino Layme told Panamericana Television that the tunnels were discovered in the southeastern province of Chumbivilcas, some 1,300 kilometers (about 808) miles southeast of the capital. The tunnels apparently were made by the Wari people who lived in the area prior to the emergence of the Inca empire and are located under the village of Lliqui. The walls of the tunnels, or...