Clash of Civilizations

Just over 500 years ago, Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan, leading an expedition from the Kingdom of Spain, discovered a sea passage in the south of the planet, a region unknown to Europeans, who called it Terra Australis Incognita. The discovery united the world in the first globalization of modern society. Groping for a passage to the Indies, the expedition, commanded by the explorer aboard the vessel Victoria, was already below latitude 52º S when, under the fog, bonfires were sighted on the coast of South America. It was the first sign of human presence. The navigators did not know it, but that land was called Karukinka (Our Land) and the fires were lit by the Selk’nam people (also known as Ona) to face the cold and cook food. The Selk’nam had arrived there more than ten thousand years ago as a result of our species’ great adventure across the planet, a journey of at least 60,000 years that started at East Africa Rift Valley and along which humans spread throughout and found there the last land – finis terrae – the last continental frontier. Hundreds of years after Ferdinand Magellan, in the 19th century, other Europeans and their descendants would arrive – this time to stay. They were farmers, bringing the culture of domesticated plants and animals, and Salesian missionaries. The outsiders found groups of hunter-gatherers living nomadically in that wild and inhospitable environment of short summers and long winters. The meeting between European farmers and hunter-gatherers meant the death sentence of the latter. A genocide that, in twenty years, brought about the almost complete extermination of the population of Tierra del Fuego. Almost. This project was supported by Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting