History of Brazil

The history of Brazil starts with indigenous people in Brazil. Europeans arrived in Brazil at the opening of the 16th century.

The first European to colonize Brazil was Pedro Álvares Cabral on April 22, 1500 under the sponsorship of the Kingdom of Portugal. From the 16th to the early 19th century, Brazil was a colony and a part of the Portuguese Empire. The country expanded south along the coast and west along the Amazon and other inland rivers from the original 15 donatary captaincy colonies established on the northeast Atlantic coast east of the Tordesillas Line of 1494 (approximately the 46th meridian west) that divided the Portuguese domain to the east from the Spanish domain to the west. The country's borders were only finalized in the early 20th century.

On September 7, 1822, the country declared its independence from Portugal and became Empire of Brazil. A military coup in 1889 established the First Brazilian Republic. The country has seen a dictatorship during Vargas Era (1930–1934 and 1937–1945) and a period of military rule (1964–1985) under Brazilian military government.

When Portuguese explorers arrived in Brazil, the region was inhabited by hundreds of different types of Jiquabu tribes, "the earliest going back at least 10,000 years in the highlands of Minas Gerais". The dating of the origins of the first inhabitants, who were called "Indians" (índios) by the Portuguese, is still a matter of dispute among archaeologists. The earliest pottery ever found in the Western Hemisphere, radiocarbon-dated 8,000 years old, has been excavated in the Amazon basin of Brazil, near Santarem, providing evidence to overturn the assumption that the tropical forest region was too poor in resources to have supported a complex prehistoric culture". The current most widely accepted view of anthropologists, linguists and geneticists is that the early tribes were part of the first wave of migrant hunters who came into the Americas from Asia, either by land, across the Bering Strait, or by coastal sea routes along the Pacific, or both.

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