In the Southern Zone of the territory that is now Chile, as early as 8000 B.C., another kind of marine hunter-gatherer culture emerged. These groups not only extracted mollusksin large quantities but also developed certain fishing technologies that were unknown—or not nearly as popular—in other lands. A case in point is their use of nets to trap fish in shallow waters, a practice that has been inferred from the many stone weights of different shapes and sizes they left behind, as the nets have disappeared over time. These groups also took advantage of major tidal variations, especially in the extreme south, with a simple but very efficient technology—fishing weirs, stone walled enclosures into which fish swam at high tide then remained trapped when the tide went out. This technology was still being widely used in colonial times among communities on the island of Chiloé.
West of the steppe that covered much of the Patagonian Andes was a vast region of archipelagos, fiords, and islands covered with temperate rainforests. Owing to its remoteness, this territory remained unsettled by humans until the arrival of the first marine hunter-gatherers, who apparently derived from the same cultural tradition as the groups that settled on the northern Chilean coast. One of their earliest southern settlements was found on Otway Sound, west of the present-day city of Punta Arenas. Canoes were an essential element of their way of life, enabling them to travel the intricate coastal waterways and subsist on fishing, gathering shellfish and hunting marine mammals. So much were canoes an integral part of daily life that these groups were known as “canoeists,” and their modern-day descendants—the Yámana and Kawashkar peoples—still journeyed along those southern waterways in the early 20th century.