A gomphothere skull cracked open at a Chilean lake hints people wanted the brain

Breaking into the skull of an animal that stood about four metres tall is not casual work, and at the former Tagua Tagua lake in central Chile the skull of an adult gomphothere appears to have been opened that way roughly 12,500 years ago. The team that excavated it says the fractures may indicate that people reached for the brain, a nutrient-rich part of the animal that could have been eaten.

It is an interpretation, not a proven meal, and the researchers frame it that way.

The skeleton at the lake edge

The dig ran from 31 August to 14 September 2026 and was led for the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile by archaeologist Rafael Labarca. Archaeology Magazine’s summary of the team’s release says the project is directed by Labarca together with Carlos Tornero and Erwin González-Guarda, and that it brings in researchers from IPHES-CERCA in Tarragona, the Autonomous University of Barcelona, the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile and the University of O’Higgins. HeritageDaily adds that it is part of the Walking with Gomphothere project, funded by Spain’s PALARQ Foundation.

The gomphothere was an extinct relative of elephants that disappeared near the end of the last Ice Age. The skeleton recovered here is described as in remarkably good condition, and it lay beside other debris of human use. Labarca summed up the association to the Chilean press: abundant gomphothere remains, some horse remains and many burned bird remains, together with stone tools. El Mostrador carried that quotation and notes the dig lies near a site worked in 1967, which suggests the archaeological zone reaches farther than first mapped.

Scale shapes the story.

HeritageDaily gives the animal’s height at about four metres and its weight at several tonnes, and notes these browsers shaped the ecosystems around them. A carcass that size is more than one group can use at once, so every part gets a decision: meat, marrow, hide, and the contents of the skull. Seen that way, a cracked braincase is a record of a choice to work through the whole animal.

Reading a fractured skull

A fractured skull is ambiguous on its own, because an animal that dies in soft lake mud can be crushed by sediment, trampling or later water movement. What turns the break into a human clue is context: stone tools and burned bone in the same layer. The researchers, quoted by Arkeonews, say the fractures may indicate that people opened the skull to reach the brain.

The evidence for people handling gomphotheres at Tagua Tagua is not new. In 2024, Labarca directed a PLOS ONE study of the nearby Taguatagua 3 site, dated to about 12,440 to 12,550 calibrated years before present. It found three proboscidean elements with cut marks, including a young gomphothere’s tail vertebra carrying eleven parallel cuts, and described the place as a temporary camp tied mainly to gomphothere hunting and butchering. The 2026 skull adds an organ to a record that so far centred on bones and cut marks.

A shoreline people kept coming back to

Labarca’s team reads the lake as a destination, not a one-off hunting ground. The release states that groups repeatedly visited the shores of Tagua Tagua during the final millennia of the Pleistocene, settling sporadically at the water’s edge, and that the 2026 dig extended the known excavated area well beyond the 1967 trench. Reading that sequence is the stated aim of the further dating and bone and sediment analysis.

The mix of species matters as much as the skull. Alongside the gomphothere, the team recovered horse bones, burned bird remains and stone artefacts, which Arkeonews quotes as evidence that early inhabitants used several kinds of animals living around Tagua Tagua instead of relying on one giant. Burned bird remains mean fire was present at the lake edge, which is consistent with food being cooked there, though the sources do not say so outright.

The dating is where the sources need careful handling. HeritageDaily gives the intensive occupation of the lakeshore as roughly 12,600 to 11,600 years before present, while Arkeonews puts the human activity at this location between about 12,600 and 12,400 years ago and says the radiocarbon dates from this season’s dig are still awaiting confirmation. The 12,500-year figure for the skeleton is therefore an estimate that the new dates will either tighten or move.

The plan stated in the release is to reconstruct the ancient shoreline and trace how human use of the lake changed over centuries or millennia, with further excavation, bone and sediment analysis and refined dating. What the release does not say is how the team will separate the brain-access fractures from natural breakage, a test that the radiocarbon-dated layer and the bone analysis Labarca’s team has planned will have to supply.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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